Agro-processing seeks official attention ‘no less favourable’ than that afforded oil and gas
An informal follow up conversation with a gathering of local agro-processors who participated in the recent Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association –staged UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium has yielded the opinion that the likely single biggest government failure up until now in terms of support for the growth of the country’s agro processing sector has been its inability, up until now, to provide a facility that will enable the country’s agro-processors to undertake “end-to-end” manufacture and packaging of their produce to a point of them leaving the facility with “ready for market” products.
Participants in the discourse noted that such a facility which they say is “long overdue”, had been the subject of discourses between the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) arising out of fact-finding discourses between the GMSA and local agro processors.
The group of seven agro-processors who manufacture jams and jellies, food spices, and beverages, expressed the view that the establishment of such a facility, or perhaps several of these across coastal Guyana, in the first instance, would allow for reduced cost considerations and logistical hassle and would ‘free up’ agro-processors to focus on securing markets for their products.
The group which included agro-processors whose processing operations are still largely confined to their domestic kitchens, told the Stabroek Business that their “greatest disappointment” had to do with the fact that despite the efforts that small businesses had made to create “on their own, a thriving agro-processing sector,” government had, up until now, made “no real effort” to “make life easier” for agro-processors by creating a “onestop processing facility.”
Much of the discourse between the Stabroek Business and the agro-processors revolved around the fact that there has not been, up until now, “any real official support” for agro-processors that would make their routines less onerous.
Contending that with more resources having come on stream as a result of the country’s oil &gas industry, government must begin to provide more “meaningful support” for the agro-processing industry by offering lowinterest loans and in some instances, grants, for food preservation equipment including freezers and dehydrators, product distribution equipment including wrapping and palletizing systems, which acquisitions they said should be influenced by the form in which food material is being processed.
Contextually, the group agreed that considerations associated with agro-processors’ acquiring equipment should be handed over to a strengthened Small Business Bureau which they said should be removed from within the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Business.
The majority of Guyana’s agro-processing sector is confined to “domestic processing” pursuits which are dominated by small kitchen-based operators who often press what, frequently, are inadequate kitchen appliances into service as agro-processing tools. While few concerns were expressed over the quality-related shortcomings that inhere in the use of domestic kitchen tools for commercial agro-processing operations, concerns were, however, expressed over the fact that the inadequacy of such tools
For the vast majority of small business owners who turned up at the recent UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium two weekends ago, the event served as a timely release valve for one of the sectors of the Guyana economy that had suffered most under the punishing regime of the coronavirus pandemic which appears, for the time being at least, to have subsided somewhat.
The Stabroek Business’ engagements with many of the stallholders who turned up at the stadium made no secret of the fact that they were there as part of what they explained were a succession of carefully planned initiatives designed to have them recover from what, in some instances, were the ravages of the pandemic.
The stories of their experiences during the difficult lockdown period varied. For those involved directly in agriculture it was a matter of protecting themselves, their families and in a handful of instances, their workers, from high levels of sustained exposure to a pandemic that was undiscriminating in the matter of where it turned up and who it afflicted. In a whole number of cases, concern over the likelihood of infection was sufficiently high to have the small-farm owners simply ‘down tools’ and retreat to the relative shelter of their homes. That meant the cessation of the flow of an income stream which, in many instances, left the victims with no options.
Setting aside the somewhat depressing aspects of our probe, however, our inquiries benefitted from a reassuring level of optimism, a determination by those who had ‘set up stalls’ at
Providence to ‘ride out’ an interlude of ‘tough times’, the duration of which, they conceded cannot be determined at this time.
If there appeared to be a measure of comfort to be derived from what had appeared, over the previous few weeks, something of a reopening of the sectors to which they have long looked for their livelihoods, they all agreed that the time frame within which that would occur could hardly be predicted.
Prior to the UncappeD event, Stabroek Business had undertaken a ‘walk through’ of the operations of some of the same agroprocessors who had set up stalls at the UncappeD event. What we found ranged from modest but impressive storage bonds crammed with product that had been ‘parked’ on account of the COVID-19-driven loss of demand to operations that had shut altogether, their proprietors looking glum, pondering their next moves.
Whether officialdom likes it or not, there exists a considerable body of opinion within the circle of businesses that attended the UncappeD event that while the pandemic was both unpredictable and unavoidable, an Act of God, as people are wont to put it, the condition of fragility and weakness in which the COVID-19 pandemic caught hundreds of businesses in the small-scale farming and agro-processing sectors had much to do with the scale of the crisis visited upon them. From the recesses of their memories they excavated challenges like the historic failure of government to adequately cater to the growth of the small-business sectors, not least agro-processing by being miserly with financing and failing, continually, to provide publicly promised infrastructure with which to consolidate the growth of the structure. High packaging and labelling standards, without which our manufactured products are unlikely to ‘see the light of day’ insofar as external markets are concerned, simply cannot be realised, across the board, without considerable help from the state. This has not been forthcoming nor has there been any real evidence of efforts by government to seek to point some of the would-be investors that have come here in response to our oil bonanza to pay a measure of interest, even a modest one, in the growth of the agro-processing and other small business sub sectors.
With our assorted groups of small farmers, agro-processors, craftsmen and women, and beauty enhancement practitioners, among others, having already hitched their sales to the masts of business models in which they have already made considerable investments, a change in entrepreneurial direction is not an easy option. Their sails are already hitched to the mast of an economic model with which they are ‘comfortable’ and from which they are far from inclined to depart. What they appear to want, more than anything else, is the creation of space in the rush and crush of official preoccupation with establishing the building blocks of our much-touted ‘oil and gas economy’ in which a more generous attention can be given to the creation of partnerships with government and the small business sectors upon which so many families depend for livelihoods and which can make their own meaningful contributions with both raising standards of living across the swathe of poor families across the country while, simultaneously, promoting Guyana abroad as something much more than an economy that has hitched its sails to the mast of an industry that has its limitations in terms of its being able to define us as a great country.