President Dr. Irfaan Ali and President of Brazil Jair Bolsanoro earlier on Friday agreed on an actionable framework that will advance cooperation in food security, energy, integration of infrastructure and national security between two nations. Following the signing of two agreements, President Ali announced that the bilateral talks serve as an opportunity to further concretise this action plan in all of these areas. "Those areas: food security and food security not only from a Guyana/ Brazilian perspective, but the CARICOM perspective. The issue of energy and energy security, infrastructure and integration of infrastructure, security, national security and defence and trade arrangements, expanding our trade arrangements and opportunities, how we better collaborate and work together.
Those were the areas in which we had extensive discussions," he said.
INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT
The two countries are also looking to integrate several projects with the development of the Deep Water Port. These include the development of the road rail link, fiber optic connectivity, development of an energy corridor and the linkage of natural resource development.
ENERGY
Guyana and Brazil will be working together on a national gas strategy and will examine ways on how it can be integrated in the development of Brazil. The two leaders also held talks on potential renewable energy collaboration, specifically hydro-electricity. "We also discussed areas that we can seek cooperation in oil and gas, the experience of Brazil in the management of oil and has industry itself is immense," the President .
NATIONAL SECURITY AND DEFENCE
National security and defence including hardware and software technology, human resource capacity building and strengthening were among the areas discussed.
“Hardware software technology which includes intelligence sharing, a security master plan that support the security architecture of both countries and our shared responsibilities and share challenges, and looking at ways in which we can deploy technology in a joint approach in securing our borders.”
AGRICULTURE AND TRADE
In the area of agriculture, a team will be working out an aggressive plan on the expansion of markets, the removal of barriers and how new technology can be deployed for the transformation of the agriculture sector and institutional arrangements.
"Creating a hub for processing and transshipment of agri produce and products to the rest of CARICOM with Guyana becoming a hub and how is it we package this to bring investors in to support what we want to achieve here in agriculture. All of this is linked intricately to our trade agreements and arrangement’s, so we have been able to frankly discuss these issues and work out these mechanism through which all of these areas will advance.”
