In August this year, the Ministry of Business had stated that the scrap metal trade will resume in November, however, with October coming to an end, the trade seems far from being reopened.
During an interview with Minister of Business, Dominic Gaskin, he noted that the initial deadline does not look feasible.
Government banned scrap metal exports in June last year and the responsibility for administration of the trade was removed from the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) and handed over to the Ministry of Business.
Minister Gaskin said he cannot guarantee that the trade will resume any time soon, noting that cabinet is also yet to approve the establishment of a Scrap Metal Unit to regulate the trade and as such it must be budgeted for and put in place.
“So there are a number of things that have to happen and the bottom line is that we cannot have an unregulated scrap metal trade. It is because it was proven in the past to be detrimental to a lot of businesses operating as well as private individuals and people are stealing grill work; you know everything is getting stolen and sold as scrap metal, so the trade needs to be regulated” the Minister said.
Gaskin said he feels Guyana can have a world class scrap metal industry once carried out in a proper manner. He said, “Scrap metal is something that is a very useful industry, it removes unsightly scrap metal from the environment, it creates jobs, it also brings in export earnings so we certainly want to support the industry but we can only do so with proper regulations.”
The scrap metal trade over the years has led to some amount of illegal collection and smuggling of metal putting the trade in a negative light.
Companies such as GTT Plus and GPL would have suffered the most from such actions in the previous years.
