It looks like economic trouble for David Granger's newly-elected coalition government in Guyana.
Gold last week hit five-year lows, dropping below US$1,100 an ounce. That is almost 40 per cent down from an August 2012 peak.
The chief executive of the state-owned sugar company Guysuco just days after the May election threatened to close down operations because he had no cash to pay his workers.
And Venezuela this month announced that it will from November end its big purchases of Guyanese rice.
Together, gold, sugar and rice make up close to 70 per cent of Guyana's exports. Another ten per cent comes from bauxite, which isn't doing that well, either.
A huge slice of the rural population–most of them Indo-Guyanese–earn a (usually modest) living from sugar or rice.
A smaller number–many of them Afro-Guyanese–tough it out in interior mining camps, then spend their hard-earned cash when they get the chance.
If they all hit trouble, that's a lot of discontent.
And there's no quick and easy way out.
Gold is down because the US economy is waking up. That should boost US company earnings, and prompt the Fed to raise interest rates. That in turn makes shares and bonds more attractive, encouraging investors to dump gold. China has been buying bullion–but not enough to boost the market.
Gold is an investors' safe haven in times of trouble. Good news on Iran's atomic programme and the Greek euro-crisis is bad news for Guyana's miners.
Gold output is down so far this year, and it will fall further. The miners are asking for fuel tax concessions, road repairs and improved security; all of which cost money.
Sugar is in trouble because Guyana's costs are way too high; their sugar costs 40 US cents per pound to produce, with the world market price at around 15 cents. Output is way below the targets set by the company's own strategic plan. Guysuco demands soaring bailouts, which the country can't afford; such is their desperation that they've been dipping into employee credit union contributions to meet company costs.
The new government in June fired Guysuco's board, then appointed a commission of enquiry, whose 11 members include a well-informed academic, Prof Clive Thomas.
But commissions can't work magic. And it's not just a Guyanese problem. The last relics of the Caribbean's preferential sugar deal with Europe disappear from 2017. Trinidad and St Kitts sensibly shut their sugar industries a decade ago. Barbados sugar is in a downward spiral.
For Guyana, sugar is too big to fail. Guysuco still employs 16,000–a big slice of the labour force. A massively expensive Chinese-built factory at Skeldon opened in 2009 and was supposed to save the industry. Its teething troubles seem unending, and it operates way below capacity.
Respected lawyer and accountant Christopher Ram says Guysuco "has moved from being an irritant, to a problem, to a burden and now a millstone... We have been bemused into the mantra that not a job must be lost"
And rice? Venezuela isn't buying because Maduro wants to grab Guyana's offshore oil. That won't change.
Next door in Suriname, Parliament this month re-elected Desi Bouterse as president for the next five years. His country too depends heavily on gold–and to a lesser extent on rice. Like Guyana, Suriname prospered in the years after 2009 when the tourist-based island economies struggled to stay afloat.
Assured of re-election, Bouterse now warns of hard times ahead, and threatens to raise water charges. He had kept these thoughts to himself while on the campaign trail.
Hope for the future? Governance minister Raphael Trotman has been playing up May's Liza-1 oil find, offshore from Guyana. He's talking 800 million barrels, maybe 1.5 billion. That would be more than T&T's proven reserves.
Let's deduct a bit for hype; that's still excellent news–but even without Venezuelan troublemaking, the oil won't flow just yet. Trotman says three to five years. That sounds just a little optimistic. It looks like a long, dark stretch before that bright new dawn.