Latest update April 24th, 2026 12:40 AM
Treat Guyanese with respect
Guyanese have for years been subjected to humiliations at national airports throughout the Caribbean. Many have tried to enter regional countries, only to be turned back by less than friendly immigration officers. In the case of Barbados it was even said that there was a special bench reserved for Guyanese.
Official protests have failed to resolve these problems. At one stage the President of Guyana had indicated that Guyanese immigration officers were going to be sent to Barbados.
How this was expected to bring about a change in the attitude of that country immigration authorities towards Guyanese is incomprehensible but so too are a number of things done by the present ruling administration at home.
Just recently, some fifteen Guyanese were turned back in Trinidad. Some of them had reportedly gone there to seek interviews for jobs. They were turned back and when they returned they complained of demeaning treatment. The local Ministry of Foreign Affairs is reportedly looking into the reasons behind these Guyanese being sent back home.
Against the background, Guyana will today be hosting two sets of important regional meetings. The Twenty-Second Meeting of the Community Council of Ministers of CARICOM takes place here. There is much business on the agenda and a great many decisions to be made.
The spotlight, however, will fall on the next meeting taking place at the International Convention Centre. This meeting will address agriculture investment and takes place in the midst of a deepening regional food crisis.
The meeting is really an attempt at networking investors and bankers as well as the sharing of information of just what is available from the governments of the region and just what is available from the financial community.
Already the signals are that Guyana is expecting large scale investments in agriculture to emerge out of the contacts created by this meeting.
The president has quite prematurely, and even before gauging the mood of the conference and the willingness of investors to invest in Guyana, signaled that his government is mulling the waiver on corporate taxes on agriculture development.
Since corporation tax in the agriculture sector is normally paid only by those involved in large and medium scale investments, of which there are not that many in Guyana apart from rice millers, there is no doubt the expectation by the Jagdeo administration that this Investment Forum being launched today will lead to large scale investment in Guyana, probably along the lines of the mega-farms mooted some time ago by Prime Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad.
If Guyana is going to be prepared to welcome foreigners who would cultivate our lands and establish agricultural corporations; if Guyana is prepared to waive the corporate taxes for these ventures, one wonders just what will be the benefit to the Guyanese people and moreover whether the President will press his regional counterparts to reciprocate for Guyanese interested in investing in member states of CARICOM.
Many of these member states are now, in the face of rising food prices, trying to revive their agriculture sectors. Many of them are in need of the farming skills of Guyanese. Many of them have found that Guyanese are good workers. Yet many of these countries are turning back Guyanese searching for jobs while their own investors are being offered the waiver of the corporation tax for agriculture investment in Guyana.
Guyana has a moral obligation, however, to become the prime mover in agriculture within the region, given our vast land mass and the skills and experience we possess in agriculture.
Surely however it is not asking too much for the government in doling out corporate tax concessions to regional investors to demand some reciprocity in the way regional immigration authorities treat our people when they go seeking opportunities in those countries.
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