Last weekend we went to Parika market. Parika is a port on the River Essequibo - which is huge, the third largest in South America and over twenty miles wide at its mouth. There are lots of islands in the estuary, mostly very fertile and on Sundays the farmers come over on speedboats to sell their fruit and veg in Parika. It's as busy and messy as you'd expect and we experimented a bit (with a little advice from Eddie, our taxi driver) buying some salted curi fish and some labba (a medium sized rodent like a small capybara). The fish was tasty but pretty bony and the labba was rather good, a cross between rabbit and beef and a welcome change from chicken and mince, so hope it's sustainable. They say that if you eat some labba and drink some creek water (which we've done in Iwokrama) you're bound to come back to Guyana so it looks as if our fates are sealed.
Anyway, it prompted some thoughts on Guyana's economy. Prices are much the same level here as in the UK but wages are much lower - which is tough for the average Guyanese and also a bit odd. Why aren't the low wages reflected in lower prices or a lower exchange rate? For what it's worth (comments from experienced development economists welcome) there seems to be a combination of reasons. First, Guyana's economy is very dependent on imports - the entire population is about that of a city like Sheffield and there are a lot of things it doesn't produce itself, including some fairly basic items. Prices therefore tend to be around world levels. Meanwhile the exchange rate is artificially sustained by remittances from overseas Guyanese (there are more Guyanese overseas than in Guyana itself); also by various forms of unrecorded economic activity, including illegal logging and mining, smuggling and the drugs trade (it's not a major transit route but for a small economy like this, the quantities that come through amount to a big number). What it adds up to is that around half the economy is illegal or externally generated, which makes life pretty tough for Guyanese working in the legal economy with no outside support no wonder so many don't stay.
Meanwhile, the rainy season is getting more settled in, which means it's also time for the World 20:20 cricket, which is the equivalent of Guyana's Wimbledon, though it only gets the first rounds (the finals are in Barbados). We get the weather about ten minutes before the cricket does(the opposite of our Wimbledon experience - it's ten minutes ahead of Lovelace Road) and we've been watching on TV rather than the stadium, I'm afraid. At least we can make a cup of tea when the rain starts.
