The price of prosperity

Oct 04, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

(Kaieteur News) – In Guyana, there is a peculiar arithmetic to prosperity. The country announces itself as one of the fastest-growing economies in the hemisphere, a petroleum state that has been transformed almost overnight into a place of billion-dollar projects, expanding infrastructure and ambitious promises about feeding the Caribbean.

Yet the arithmetic performed at the supermarket checkout is less impressive. There the numbers are smaller, more intimate and more consequential. A salary enters the household at the end of the month and disappears into rice, flour, sugar, milk and cooking oil.