Gold price increase can benefit Guyana

The increase in gold prices on the international market could help Guyana surpass its targeted production. The increase follows the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) vote to leave the European Union (EU) last Friday.
Natural Resources Minister Raphael Trotman told the Government Information Agency (GINA) in an invited comment that “We’re happy that our (gold) prices have increased.”
However, Trotman added “We’re not happy that our increases comes really on the back of a broken system elsewhere.” Gold is now trading at just over US00 per ounce on the international market.
This increase on the international market is likely to help Guyana surpass its targeted production and declaration in gold locally. Guyana’s budgeted target for gold production this year is 550,000 ounces.
“I don’t want to reveal what is our target internally but we’re working on a target that goes past 550,000 ounces. So I would say that we’re doing relatively well in the circumstances,” Trotman noted. He added that he would like to see production declaration surpass 600,000.
Additionally, Trotman told GINA that as a “citizen of the world,” the situation in Europe concerns us all. “Stability is what the world wants so anything that disrupts the national or global order is something that we should all be concerned about,” Trotman said.
“In as much as we’re happy for the increase in gold prices, very happy, we also would like to see stability and normalcy in all parts of the world including Europe,” the Natural Resources Minister added. Over the past year, the price of gold has declined significantly.
In 2015, gold prices steadily tumbled, with a drastic drop. Experts had predicted that gold prices would have continue to slump, hitting a more than a five-year low, with a high possibility that the precious metal could plunge to a detrimental US00 per ounce.
Compounding the situation was the fact that, the cost of production, particularly for the small and medium-scale miners of gold and diamond, had remained largely unchanged.