With the Gold industry remaining Guyana’s most important foreign exchange earner, concerns are being raised about the possible effect this can have on the local economy in the future.
According to President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), Vishnu Doerga, the population of that sector is much lower than the percentage in other sectors such as farming.
The GCCI Head said it is important for Government to look at the sectors that earn a lot of foreign exchange as well as filters money back into the economy.
“And usually with the return from Gold, it usually gets invested into some other form…they get a lot of it invested into real-estate which means that the money again gets stuck there. Unlike farming, if you take rice for example, when monies is paid out to the farmers a large proposition of that money gets spent in the economy and it filters down, you know people pays their debts, people pay their suppliers and those suppliers pay somebody else and they pay their security, they pay everybody else so that money gets completely filtered into the economy and that is one of the biggest differences high value commodities like Gold its where the monies ends up” Doerga outlined.
The Guyana Office for Investment over the years would have recorded that Gold remains the top principle export followed by rice, bauxite and sugar.
According to the body, Canada and the United States of America continue to be Guyana’s primary export markets aside from other regional countries.
For 2016, Gold declarations are being reported at 690, 000 ounces and are being attributed to the small and medium scale miners who delivered the majority of this gold along with the two larger companies; Guyana Goldfields and Troy Resources.
