About three weeks after my arrival in Ghana that a friend, Yao, handed me the calabash of palm wine with the directive, “Try this; it’s deha, palm wine.” I had heard much about the treasured drink that was such a staple of West Afrikans’ culture it also reigned in their literature but the frothy, milk-like [...]
The International Monetary Fund has approved a US$1.25 billion loan to support Jamaica’s economic reforms and help the country cope with the consequences of the global financial crisis, Trevor Alleyne, the IMF’s mission chief to the island announced in Washington, Thursday. Alleyne said the executive board approved the loan Thursday and the period to be [...]
The governments of Jamaica and China have signed agreements valued more than US$500 million, a release from the office of the island’s prime minister said Thursday. The agreements cover the construction of affordable housing, road repair and rehabilitation as well as shoreline protection and rehabilitation on the Palisadoes roadway which links the island’s main airport [...]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has painted a more optimistic view of the global economy in its latest World Economic Outlook (WEO) and its Global Financial Stability Reports but officials say Latin America and Caribbean growth is still at pre-crisis levels. “In 2010, world output is expected to rise by 4 percent,” the WEO report [...]
Many writers have excused Jamaica’s poor economic performance by blaming or ascribing it to the global melt down. While I will admit that that occurrence affected visitor arrivals, Jamaica’s economic woes were set in motion long ago. Let me hive off one little piece of our unreadiness. We built the mercantile trade of the Maritime [...]
Prime Minister Bruce Golding says Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean need to be liberated from the nostalgia of an era of protective market when they could punish their consumers as they chose, by shutting their borders so that foreign goods could not easily come in and consumers were condemned to substandard products. ‘We [...]
The abortive hijacking of a Canadian flight at Montego bay’s Sangster International Airport, could well be the death knell for Jamaica’s insipid tourism industry if the industry’s players are not proactive. It is time to cut the posturing and act to save what’s left of a formerly dependable sector. Recently there has been much crowing [...]
FirstCaribbean Corporate Banking Curacao has successfully closed a landmark US$45 million refinancing transaction with Pristine Estates N.V., which owns the 612-room 3.5 star Holiday Inn Resort and Casino in Aruba, the bank has announced. FirstCaribbean has been associated with Pristine since 1999 as part of a syndicate which included partner banks Maduro & Curiel’s Bank [...]
Jamaica seems to have some dark economic clouds on the horizon and that has been so for a long time wherein our economy has been in recession for a number of years. The country’s productivity and even attitude to work has been in free fall while crime and other antisocial ills spiral out of control. [...]
The Bible story says Jesus turned water into wine when the spirits ran low at the wedding in Cana. Malcolm Wood, in Bridgetown, Barbados, is working on the miracle of creating a Caribbean fruit wine business in an industry that snubs the notion of terming as wine anything but fermentation derived from grapes. Since the [...]