Suriname staring customary seasonal heavy rains in the face

Neighbouring Suriname is reportedly having its own fair share of woes arising out of the seasonal rains with which countries in South America are all too familiar.

Reports surfaced earlier this week that Guyana’s neighbour to the east has had to summon an emergency team from the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) to support the country’s response to this year’s heavy flooding. Reports say that the focus of the CDEMA team’s mission will be on assessing the physical impact of the recent customary seasonal rainfall in the region.

Just over a week ago the country’s president, Chandrikapersad Santokhi, announced to the nation that several districts of the country in the interior and southern areas had been severely affected by continuous rainfall which began more than two months ago.

Seasonal rainfall and its effects are occurrences which Suriname share with Guyana, some of the specific consequences being significant losses to floodwaters in the countries’ agricultural sectors, as well as destruction of roads, serious damage to homes, displacement of families and the necessity to pour significant amounts of resources into emergency relief and repairs’ responses.

The CDEMA functionaries named as part of the Trinidad and Tobago-based response team are the Agency’s Programme Manager, Preparedness and Response, Joanne Persad and Navindra Persad from the entity’s Disaster Preparedness Office in Trinidad and Tobago. The visit, reportedly, will seek to trigger a response which will, a priori, determine and afterwards respond to targeted humanitarian needs.

Following the declaration from President Santokhi, CDEMA activated a high-level meeting attended by its international partner donors operating in the region, where more than a dozen pledged humanitarian assistance to the Suriname people.

In neighbouring Guyana, the government has already broken the grim news that this year’s weather-related floods are likely to realise a level of intensity similar to that seen last year when thousands of households in communities across the country were severely affected.

Days ago, news surfaced that residents of the Region

Ten community of Kwakwani have been receiving official advice to embrace relocation options in circumstances where the already seriously rain-affected community reportedly faces the imminent threat of further heavy rainfall and attendant flooding.

The authorities here are also likely to be gearing themselves to respond to what, over the years, has been the routine seasonal heavy rainfall in interior regions of the country, where a lack of access to nearby emergency response facilities aggravates the situation.

Seasonal heavy rainfall also leaves its mark on the country’s economy by devastating huge swathes of farmland across the country, creating serious shortages of agricultural produce that result in protracted periods of price rises of fresh vegetables, fruit that create knock-on scarcities in the related agro processing sector.

One question that arises in both Guyana and Suriname is whether and how quickly the two countries will seek to invest significant portions of their oil & gas earnings to strengthen infrastructure that will help mitigate against what, over the years, has become the draining socio-economic consequences of flooding.

West’s looming oil supply crisis fails to break Caracas/ Washington logjam

Much to the disappointment of a number of countries in the hemisphere, the administration of President Joe Biden has opted to ‘pile on the pressure’ on Venezuela by moving to renew a licence that imposes only a partial exemption on the US company, Chevron Corporation’s workings in Venezuela’s oil sector.

A new licence, setting out the paradigms of Washington’s expectations of Chevron’s relationship with the oil industry in Venezuela reportedly retains the US oil company’s partial exemption from sanctions that are in place in order to allow for the company to keep operating in Venezuela.

Analysts see the Biden administration ‘hedging of bets’ in the matter of the involvement of US companies in seeking to keep Venezuela’s oil industry going in the hope that the country’s vast oil reserves may serve as an important factor in determining the security of oil supplies to the west in circumstances where pressures on Moscow to end its hostilities against Ukraine have to be further stiffened by the imposition of the further targeting of oil exports from Russia.

A licence issued to Chevron by the US Treasury Department a week ago reportedly allows the oil major, along with other US companies, to perform what is described in one report as the “basic upkeep of wells” which the company runs along with Venezuela’s state-run oil company, PDVSA.

The position of the Biden administration will come as a disappointment to the Maduro administration which would have been hoping for a resumption of exports in order to help salvage what, in recent years, has been an economy devastated by the US-imposed blockages that have seriously impacted on both the functioning of Venezuela’s oil & gas infrastructure as well as on its ability to export oil.

Just months ago it appeared to have been thought that the targeting of oil supplies from Russia for sanctions might have led to a softening by the Biden administration of the long-standing policy of his predecessor’s administration of strangling Venezuela’s oil exports. Things appeared to be ‘looking up’ in that regard when, in March, senior US officials met with Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro, apparently to seek to have him return to the negotiating table with the country’s USbacked, Juan Guaidó-led opposition. That ploy, it now appears, has failed, and in the meanwhile, President Maduro has strengthened Venezuela’s bilateral ties with Iran, a move out of which he has secured support for the country’s ailing oil industry.

US sanctions against Venezuela have been in place since 2019.

Indications of what had been a seeming willingness on the parts of both Washington and Caracas to negotiate their way out of the crisis appear to have been a ‘false alarm.’ In the wake of the stalemate, hardliners in the US Congress have waded into President Biden’s administration for what they see as attempts to placate President Maduro in circumstances where little if anything has been secured from that approach.

Notes

1 - Interim Results

2 - Prospective Dividends

3 - Shows year-end EPS but Interim Dividend

4 - Shows Interim EPS but year-end Dividend

EPS: earnings per share for 12 months period to the date the latest financials have been prepared. These include: 2016 - Final results for CJL and PHI. 2020 - Final results for GSI and JPS.

2021 - Final results for CCI, DDL, DTC, BTI, HCL, RDL and SPL.

2022 - Interim results for DIH, CBI, DBL and RBL.

As such, some of these EPS calculations are based on un-audited figures.

P/E Ratio: Price/Earnings Ratio = Last Trade Price/EPS

Dividend yield = Dividends paid in the last 12 months/last trade price.