EU Facilitating Talks For Possible Production Of Pharmaceuticals in Guyana & Barbados

• The European Union (EU) envoy in Guyana has been facilitating talks for possible pharmaceutical production in Guyana.
• This is according to the European Union Ambassador to Guyana Rene Van Nes, during an interview with reporters on Thursday, July 13. He said that this initiative is about seeing if Guyana, together with Barbados and Rwanda could play a role in pharmaceutical production.
• Van Nes related that this is an interesting South-South operation. The EU, he said, assisted Rwanda to set up its own production facility for pharmaceuticals, which started with ‘COVID’ and the realisation that there was in Africa no production facility for ‘COVID’ vaccines.
• Further to this, the ambassador said that a relationship was made between the President of Rwanda, the Prime Minister of Barbados and Guyana’s President Dr. Irfaan Ali.
• He said that these leaders have begun talks on how to replicate this type of facility in Barbados and Guyana. Van Nes said: “That is a very fascinating process, so we actually have people coming up and down. We have experts that already came to Guyana to look at the possibilities; of course, this is not the EU that is going to invest. What we want is to bring European companies to Guyana and Barbados to create here, production facilities in the pharmaceutical sector.”
• This, he added, means that Guyana would have to look at its regulatory framework, investment environment, and scientific ecosystem to facilitate same. The ambassador related that the EU hopes that together with the government and experts, they would be able to create such an environment that would encourage the European private sector to invest in this sector.

(Source: Guyana Chronicle)