The 2026 Budget contains a number that should be on the front page of every business publication in Guyana, but isn’t. Total merchandise exports in 2025 reached US$20.1 billion. Imports rose to US$10.3 billion. The country posted a merchandise trade surplus of US$9.9 billion, one of the largest in the region by any per-capita measure. By the numbers, Guyana is now a major trading nation, with new rice export markets opened in Latvia, Hungary, the British Virgin Islands, Slovenia, Estonia, Lebanon, Angola, and Sierra Leone. Sugar revival aimed at CARICOM and global supply. Aquaculture explicitly oriented toward export markets. By the headline measures of trade performance, this should be a country in the middle of an export-led transformation.
But two things make the headline measures misleading. The first is the composition of exports. Roughly ninety-one percent of Guyana’s 2024 exports by value were crude oil, the most basic, undifferentiated commodity in international trade, sold to refiners abroad who add the value, capture the margins, and sell the finished products back to the same regional consumers, often including us. The Atlas of Economic Complexity, produced by Harvard’s Growth Lab, ranks Guyana among the least diversified export economies in the world, with productive capability actually narrowing rather than broadening during the oil boom. We export more than ever, but we export almost one thing.
The second is the composition of imports. Guyana is still importing roughly fifty-three million hatching eggs a year, at a cost of around GY$350 million, to support a poultry sector the government celebrates as self-sufficient. We import wheat, dairy, processed foods, vehicles, machinery, refined petroleum products, fertiliser, and a long list of agricultural and industrial inputs that the country could in principle produce or process domestically. The trade surplus is real, but it is a surplus generated by selling raw resources and buying back finished goods, which is the textbook structure of an extraction economy rather than a development economy.
The mystery middle is where the value addition should be happening and is not. A barrel of crude that leaves Guyana at the prevailing market price is worth several times more once it has been refined into gasoline, diesel, and petrochemicals at a refinery in another country. A pound of rice that leaves Guyana as a commodity is worth more when it reaches a foreign retail shelf as a branded product. A piece of bauxite is worth far more after it has passed through alumina refining and aluminium smelting. In every case, the wealth compounding happens downstream from us, in the economies that buy what we send and sell us back the finished version. We finance their industrialisation through our exports, then pay again to consume what they have made.
This is not destiny. Indonesia banned the export of raw nickel in 2020 and forced domestic processing. Within two years, its nickel export value rose from US$1 billion to US$20 billion, and the country became central to global battery supply chains. Botswana negotiated for diamond cutting and polishing to happen in Gaborone rather than Antwerp. Malaysia, the world’s second-largest palm oil producer, built a downstream refining and oleochemical industry that supplies seventy countries through national companies.
Guyana stands at the same crossroads. The trade numbers tell us we have resources and revenues. They do not tell us we are building anything that lasts beyond them. Closing the mystery middle, capturing more of the value chain at home, is the work of the next decade. The trade surplus headline is not the destination. It is the starting line.