The Oil Is Guyana's, But the Opportunity Belongs to Us All

Guyana's oil boom is the Caribbean's best chance in a generation to build a single, self-reliant economy, and squandering it on one nation's balance sheet would be a regional failure.

In thirty years around Caribbean banking, I learned to distrust booms. I watched sugar, bauxite and tourism each promise permanence and each deliver a cycle. So I approach Guyana's oil with the caution of a former managing director who has seen balance sheets flatter and then betray small economies. And yet I cannot remember a chance like this one, and I do not think we get another.

The scale is not speculative. Guyana's economy grew 43.6% in 2024, according to its Bureau of Statistics, ranking it among the fastest-growing economies in the world. Offshore output from the ExxonMobil-led Stabroek Block, worked alongside Hess and CNOOC, has climbed past 900,000 barrels a day, and 2026 volumes are running ahead of forecast. The country's Natural Resource Fund, its sovereign wealth vehicle, crossed four billion United States dollars for the first time this year.

A regional windfall, not a national one

Here is my position. This money should be treated as capital, not as one nation's lucky cash. The Caribbean already owns the instrument to do it. The CARICOM Single Market and Economy, the CSME, was built precisely so that goods, capital, skills and enterprise could move across our borders as if the region were one market. For decades it has moved too slowly. A patient, Guyana-anchored pool of investment in regional ports, energy, agriculture and manufacturing could give the single market the momentum that forty years of communiques never did.

Food is the obvious place to start. CARICOM imports billions of dollars in food each year, an absurd dependency for fertile islands. The 25 by 2025 initiative, championed by Guyana's President Irfaan Ali and now extended toward 2030, aims to cut that regional food bill by a quarter. Guyana has the land and now the money; its neighbours have the markets and the mouths. Financing regional agriculture is not charity. It is the highest-return investment on offer, and it retires a shared vulnerability.

The risks deserve an honest hearing

I will not pretend the objections are trivial. Dutch disease is real; oil money can inflate a currency and hollow out the farming and manufacturing that integration is meant to build. Governance is real; a sovereign fund is only as sound as the institutions that guard it, and Guyana's are young. And sovereignty is real; no Guyanese voter elected a government to underwrite the region, and it is fair to ask why Georgetown should carry Kingston or Bridgetown.

But these arguments cut both ways. The surest defence against Dutch disease is to invest the windfall in productive capacity outside the oil sector, and a regional market is the widest field in which to do it. The surest defence against a governance failure is to bind the fund to transparent, cross-border projects that many eyes are watching. And the sovereignty question answers itself once you count the return: a stable, integrated, food-secure region is a safer and richer neighbourhood for Guyana than a resentful ring of stagnating states. Integration is not a gift Guyana gives; it is a hedge Guyana buys.

So my argument to my fellow Caribbean readers, and to Georgetown, is simple. The oil is finite and Guyana's alone. The prosperity it could seed is renewable and could be ours together. I have spent an entire career waiting for the capital to make the single market real. It has arrived. Let us not record, a generation from now, that the Caribbean's richest decade was also its most divided.