– 15% decrease a ‘diplomatic win’
Vice President and General Secretary of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), Dr Bharrat Jagdeo has pushed back against the deliberate attempt to distort facts surrounding the recent reduction in tariffs on Guyanese exports by the United States Government.
Citing a headline from “Stabroek News” that claimed, “Trump ups tariffs on Guyana by 5 per cent”, the vice president dismissed the report as misleading and entirely false.
“Any sensible person here would know that it was 38 per cent. It is now 15 per cent,” he said during a press conference on Thursday at Freedom House, where he address this and a number of other pressing issues.
He believes that, “this is all to support a narrative that our discussions with the U.S. government failed.”
Dr Jagdeo informed reporters that the original 38 per cent tariff imposed by the Trump administration announced in April 2025, tied to Guyana’s growing trade surplus with the U.S. The surplus is largely driven by Guyana’s oil exports, which have increased since 2020.
In contrast, countries like Haiti, Cuba, and Suriname, which import more from the U.S. than they export, received lower tariffs at 10 per cent.
“They understood the argument that our trade surplus arose largely because of the oil export and as a result of that, when the new announcement came, it fell from 38 per cent to 15 per cent,” the vice president said.
He credited the government’s active engagement with U.S. trade officials, including meetings led by Senior Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance and the Public Service, Dr Ashni Singh, for securing the reduction.
He told reporters that the government continues to engage with the US to decrease the rate even lower, down to 10 per cent.
The vice president slammed commentator Christopher Ram for what he called bitter, fossilized criticism, saying Ram and others seem to twist good news into negativity just to feed an anti-government narrative.
“Although we are a country that has a huge trade surplus with the U.S., the other countries were not so successful,” he noted. “They they said it’s a failure of our diplomacy [but] it is a success of our economic diplomacy,” urging Guyanese to celebrate the achievement.
