CARICOM oil producers Guyana and Suriname signed a tourism agreement on Monday in Paramaribo that is intended to boost efforts in both countries to increase tourism and visitor arrivals between the two territories.
The Tourism Accord is viewed as a very timely and strategic mechanism, coming as it does in the midst of preparations for the February 2020 Tourism Expo of the Guianas which Guyana will be hosting at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre.
The vision, hopes and planning for such an agreement date back almost two decades and that long antecedence speaks to a common and shared national vision that has been kept alive through successive administrations in both countries, said Donald Sinclair, Director General of Tourism in Guyana.
After the signing, tourism representatives of both Guyana and Suriname met informally to outline the immediate steps in actioning the Accord. Key among those is the establishment of a Guyana-Suriname Tourism Cooperation Council, to be convened within one month of the signing. This Council will oversee all actions arising from the Accord, and will comprise three representatives from each country, drawn from both Public and Private sector.
Signing on behalf of Guyana was Minister of Business, Haimraj Rajkumar, while Minister of Trade, Tourism and Industry, Stephen Tsang signed on behalf of Suriname.
The start of oil production in Guyana is expected to play a major role in ramping up the number of visitors to the country where over 6 billion barrels of crude have been found offshore. Suriname, already an oil producer from development of its shorebase resources, has been actively looking for hydrocarbon resources offshore, particularly in light of ExxonMobil’s unprecedented success in Guyana.
