Burnham nationalized bauxite, sugar and cotton at the exact moment world demand fell. He set up several co-operative banks (which borrowed money at interest from foreign central banks and then lent at interest to locals), which were inherently unsustainable. In Trinidad people look at him as a vote rigging racist, but he almost did something good in the late 1960s with his agriculture plans, though these totally failed by the 1970s. Guyana would today have had a totally self reliant, sustainable agricultural sector if Burnham and the Amercans didn't totally mess it up. Now the Guyanaese are forced to import 8 percent of their rice from Trinidad (why? our rice tastes nasty), while exporting 12 percent abroad. It's a pointless system. The IMF has Guyana exporting rice cheaply and importing expensive Trinidad rice.
Almost half of Guyanaese export is now gold (sugar and aluminium is next), but its the Canadians profiting off this. They got about 45 thousand under-age child labourers working in those mines right now, and the government doesn't care. Last time I went Guyana, the IMF had yall giving massive ten year tax breaks to American, French and Asian logging companies. I don't know if that is still going on. A friend of mine says its all Brazilian and Chinese investments propping up the country, along with massive mining and forestry operations. But Trinidad is actually your top import destination, you guys getting lots of your petroleum, coal and goods from us (17 percent of all your annual imports come from TnT).
Basically, Guyana imports fuel and food from Trinidad as an energy source for humans and machinery so that Guyanaese can export food and minerals (gold, aluminium, molasses, diamonds etc) to the US and Canada (who account for over 60 percent of your exports). All these transactions are then mediated by a foreign owned central banking system which pretends to be local/nationalized and which continually and invisibly takes a cut.
What yall need to do is give Carl Hooper a gun, Sarwan a fishing boat, and INVADE TRINIDAD and OVERTHROW OUR GOVERNMENT. All Trinidadian women are Guyanese anyway. Guyanese women always migrate to the finest male specimens.