The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

The Rate They Won’t Say Out Loud: How a President’s Grocery-Cart Economics Collides With Guyana’s Currency Reality

BOARD EDITORIAL–August,2026

President Irfaan Ali has, in the span of a single public conversation, offered Guyanese two explanations for why their money buys less than it used to. First, that the problem is where they shop — that a shift toward supermarkets and restaurants, rather than traditional markets, is itself inflating the cost of living. Second, and relatedly, that the habit of eating out is part of what is driving households into difficulty.

Both explanations share a structure: they locate the cause of a national affordability crisis inside the consumer’s own choices, rather than inside the policy environment that shapes what those choices cost.

This editorial does not dispute that some Guyanese, like consumers everywhere, spend imperfectly. What it disputes is the substitution of a behavioural narrative for a currency and supply-chain reality that is measurable, documented, and largely outside any household’s control.

THE NUMBER THE PRESIDENT IS NOT CITING

Guyana’s official, Bank of Guyana-referenced exchange rate has held in a narrow band around G$207 to G$209 to the US dollar through the first half of 2026 — a rate that has been remarkably stable for over a decade. That is the number that appears in Customs Act notifications, commercial bank forex boards, and the mental arithmetic most Guyanese still use: divide by two hundred, add a little, and you have the dollar value.

It is not, however, the rate importers are actually paying when they go looking for US currency to bring in the goods that stock a supermarket shelf or a market stall. When the commercial banking system is short of forex — as it has been for stretches of this year — importers are pushed toward parallel channels where the price of a US dollar runs meaningfully higher, into the G$230–240 range by trader account. That gap between the published rate and the street rate is not a rounding error. It is a second, informal exchange rate that Guyana’s importers absorb silently and pass forward, and that the public conversation about “consumer behaviour” never mentions.

The dollar is already beaten up before the item reaches the shelf — and the country is still doing the math at a rate that hasn’t applied for months.

This is the mechanism the President’s framing skips entirely. A trader who cannot access US dollars at the official window through a commercial bank, and who must instead source them on the parallel market, is not paying an inflated price because Guyanese suddenly prefer supermarkets to markets. He is paying it because the forex is not there at the rate the country believes is still in effect. That cost does not stay with the importer. It travels through the wholesale margin, through the retail margin, and lands — fully loaded — on the price tag a consumer blames on the cashier.

WHERE THE REGIONAL COMPARISON ACTUALLY POINTS

The government has reached for a regional comparison of its own on the inflation question, and on paper it is a favourable one: the IMF’s April 2026 outlook placed Guyana’s projected 2026 inflation at 5.7 percent, against a projected Caribbean regional average of 6.6 percent. Read in isolation, that comparison suggests Guyana is managing price growth better than most of its neighbours, and a government spokesperson would not be wrong to cite it.

But a headline CPI figure measures the average change in a broad consumer basket against a prior year. It does not measure whether a specific, forex-exposed food and household-goods basket — the one working households actually buy weekly — is moving in line with that average, or well ahead of it. Guyana’s exceptional case is precisely what makes the regional comparison misleading rather than reassuring: this is an economy where GDP grew by more than 40 percent in 2024 and close to 20 percent in 2025, driven by oil revenue that has not required the exchange rate, the forex supply chain, or the import market to modernise at anywhere near the same pace. A country can post a favourable CPI average and still have a currency-access problem that hammers importers and, through them, ordinary households, month over month.

The two facts are not in tension. They are describing different layers of the same economy.

Put plainly: citing a 5.7 percent inflation figure against a 6.6 percent regional average answers a question nobody struggling to fill a grocery cart is asking. The question is not how Guyana’s basket compares to Barbados’s or Jamaica’s on paper. It is why a basket bought with oil-boom prosperity still requires importers to hunt for scarce dollars at a rate 15 to 20 percent above the one the country is still mentally using.

WHAT THE FRAMING OBSCURES

None of this is to say every household budget in Guyana is being managed flawlessly, or that personal overspending never happens. It happens everywhere, in every economy. But a national cost-of-living conversation is not well served by collapsing a structural, currency-driven, supply-chain problem into a story about where people choose to shop or whether they occasionally eat out.

That framing is not just imprecise. It is convenient — for a government that has yet to publish retailer mark-up data, has yet to lay out a public timeline for expanding market infrastructure at the pace demand requires, and has yet to explain what, if anything, is being done to close the gap between the official exchange rate and the one importers are actually paying.

If prosperity from Guyana’s oil wealth is reaching ordinary citizens, it should be visible first at the exchange rate they depend on to buy the ordinary things they need. Until the government is prepared to speak as plainly about that rate as it is about consumer behaviour, this newsroom will keep insisting on the distinction: the problem was never the restaurant table, or the shopping cart, or the cashier. It is whether prosperity is reaching the people — and at what rate they are being made to pay for the wait.

— The Board