GraceKennedy among foreign buyers lining up for GUYTIE

Up to late on Wednesday the Secretariat charged with rolling out the much anticipated Guyana Trade and Investment Exposition (GUYTIE) was still in the process of finalizing complete lists of ‘buyers and sellers’ expected to gather at the Marriott Hotel for four days beginning next Wednesday though the latest indications are that potential buyers who will travel to Georgetown to ‘check out’ local goods and services available to the international market are likely to be dominated by business houses from the Caribbean.

The standout entity on the most recent updated list of buyers made available to this newspaper by the organizers is the internationally renowned Grace Kennedy Ltd of Jamaica, the region’s leading distributor of food and non-food consumer products with a global market reach that embraces the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, India and Africa.

By yesterday, the list of foreign buyers expected here for the event had also included the Aggressive Export Promotion Services team from India, Serviço Brasileiro de Apoio às Micro e Pequenas Empresas, (SEBRAE) the Brazilian group whose profile is built around its work aimed at fostering the development of micro and small enterprises and stimulating entrepreneurship and the St. Kitts and Nevis Chamber of Commerce. Stabroek Business understands that up to Wednesday the local organizers were still engaging Surinamese officials with a view to determining the extent to which Guyana’s CARICOM neighbour will be represented at GUYTIE.

Last week the Stabroek Business had reported that the initial list of ‘buyers’ made available to this newspaper by the organizers had pointed to indications of a dominant regional presence for the GUYTIE event which is being staged by the Ministry of Business in collaboration with the Caribbean Export Development Agency (Caribbean Export) and local private sector support bodies. The organizers have made no secret of their hope that GUYTIE will create a platform for local export-ready businesses to meaningfully engage foreign buyers in discourses that will yield positive results for the country’s export sector.

The organizers have said that a key objective of GUYTIE is to foster investment opportunities for fifty to one hundred export ready local companies.

By Wednesday the list of foreign entities expected here for GUYTIE had grown to more than eighty and while the overseas