The hotel industry must use more locally produced goods, services

TIMES INT'L

Dear Editor,
The caption caught me instantly. I thought “Way to go Guyana”. However, on reading the story, I found out that it was the words uttered by Barbadian Independent Senator John Watson. He was expressing great concerns about the leakage of the earnings in the country’s tourism industry, and suggesting that if more locally produced goods and services were used in that sector, things would have been better for the local economy. This has a big message for us in Guyana.
I need not go to tourism but I think that Guyana must go local. The current food importation bill is just too high. In fact, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) is bothered by it. At least seven countries in the region have an average importation bill of more than US$500 per capita. Guyana has a per capita food importation bill of approximately US$250 per year, but this is still way too high, since the average importation per capita is US$66. It is evident that there should definitely be some changes.
The shift to local is already being discussed between Guyana and Trinidad. There are discussions between the two countries to produce crops like potato and onion in large quantities, hence, preventing and avoiding the importation of these high-volume products from outside of the Caribbean region.
There are many fruits that are being wasted in our country and are not being fully utilised for cooking, making drink/juice, preserving, used in cakes and so on. Guyana has so much to offer in terms of foiling importation of many things. We just have to change our mindset and go local, at least where fruits are concerned.
This is an actual story: A Guyanese elder introduced a Canadian woman to a few of our mangoes, particularly the ‘Buxton Spice’. The lady, after eating the first one, was overwhelmed. She admitted there and then that the fruit ranks as one of the best she had ever tasted. We just do not appreciate the good we have.
It is time that Guyana really employs an attitude like the persons from Barbados are trying to adopt now.
Here too, we must seek to stop the ‘leakage of earnings’ and rake in much-needed foreign exchange, by going local. Fruits alone will have great dividends. Tourism does entail a lot of goods and services and the more we are able to get the tourism sector to use more local stuff, the better it is for the country.
Yours faithfully,
Antoine Xavier

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