Guyana
The Co-operative Republic of Guyana (formerly British Guiana) is the only English-speaking country in South America. Guyana is uniquely situated on the Guiana Shield- bordered on the south by Brazil, on the east by Suriname and on the west by Venezuela.
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The word ‘Guiana’ is of Amerindian origin and is reputed to mean ‘Land of Waters’. In the sixteenth century, Europeans were led to believe that Guiana was the home of a city paved with gold, called ‘El Dorado’. The quest for El Dorado led the Europeans to settle the country but the vast wealth was never discovered. The Europeans would instead exploit the other natural resources of the country by establishing sugar, timber and balata plantations.
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The descendants of the country’s original settlers, ‘Amerindians’ still reside across Guyana’s eighteen million hectares of rainforest. Outside of the Amerindians, the present population of Guyana is ethnically heterogeneous, comprising chiefly of the descendants of immigrants, predominantly, African, East Indians, Portuguese and Chinese, who came to the country either as enslaved or as indentured labourers to work on European-established plantations.
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Guyana gained its independence from Great Britain on the 26th of May 1966 after four hundred (468) years of colonial rule (Dutch, French and British). Later, on 23 February 1970, Guyana became a Co-operative Republic with an elected president as head of state.
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Owing to its colonial past, Guyana is economically and culturally connected to the English-speaking Caribbean. The country is one of the founding members and host country of the Caribbean Regional Organisation- CARICOM Secretariat. (The Caribbean Community-CARICOM is a grouping of twenty countries: fifteen Member States and five Associate Members).
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Since the discovery of crude oil in 2015 and commercial drilling in 2019, Guyana has emerged as the world's fastest-growing new oil province in a decade with discoveries of more than 11 billion barrels of oil and gas. By 2027, one oil company in operation-Exxon Mobil- is set to produce over 1.2 million barrels per day. By 2035, Industry analysts estimate that Guyana’s oil output will reach 1.7 million barrels of oil per day, surpassing United States oil production and becoming the fourth-largest oil producer in the world. Currently, Guyana’s crude oil production is averaged at 400,000 barrels of oil per day.
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Guyana has emerged as an attractive market to do business in the post-COVID-19 pandemic. The country’s demand for real estate has grown. Private sector surveys highlight a sharp increase in residential real estate prices in Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana, with the ratios of price-to-rent and price-to-income surpassing neighbouring countries in mid-2019.
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Outside of oil, Guyana boasts many natural resources for export markets, including, gold, rice, fish, timber and sugar.
Jamaica
Before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century to the island, the original inhabitants of Jamaica were believed to be the Arawaks, also called Tainos. The island was originally referred to as ‘Xaymaca’, which meant ‘Land of wood and water’. The Europeans on their quest to find the “New World” arrived on the island on May 5, 1494, and eradicated the indigenous inhabitants.
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By the seventeenth century when the European colonists became keen to exploit wealth from the island’s natural resources, they developed sugar plantations. With the indigenous people eradicated and no other labour supply to work on the plantations, the Europeans turned to the African continent, where they captured and transported millions of Africans from various countries to fill the labour needs across the island’s plantations. The sugar industry grew exponentially from 57 sugar estates on the island in 1673 to nearly 430 by 1739 with enslaved Africans, and later indentured labourers as the predominant labour source.
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While Jamaica changed European colonial rule several times, it was the English that held control of the island for more than 300 years from 1655 until 1966 when the island gained political independence. During the British colonial rule, an estimated two million enslaved Africans were imported to the island and treated as “chattel/property” (moveable inanimate thing) with no remuneration and subjected to restrictive land acquisition and land use policies.
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Post-independence Jamaica moved away from the sugar plantation industries and expanded other agricultural products such as bananas and coffee. Jamaica also moved into tourism, manufacturing, bauxite, finance and business outsourcing industries. Today, Jamaica is the 6th easiest place to start a business globally. The island has a well-developed infrastructure, with world-class highways, airports and seaports.
Currently, in addition, to the expansion of its tourism industry to Latin American markets, Jamaica is building its logistics hub based on a logistics-centric model like Dubai and Singapore.
The logistics clusters will generate substantial cargo flows of raw materials, and intermediate and finished goods and utilise supporting multi-modal infrastructure. Jamaica’s logistics hub will expand the local cargo base with more industries, shippers and 3PLs operating from inland SEZs. Expansion of Jamaican airports into air cargo hubs has economic impacts on the seaports as well.