Fallacy of a vibrant small business sector
As this newspaper has said several times before, we have every reason to be exceedingly proud of the various small economic ventures in the agriculture, agro-processing and the creative sectors. These are a monument to the hard work and persistence of their owners that created these enterprises, made them viable, and caused them to become either full or partial means of providing a living for families.
Particularly impressive has been the incremental strides that some of those enterprises in the agro-processing sector have made, their owners taking them from trial-and-error initiatives, many of which could not even secure a place on the shelves of local consumer goods outlets, far less secure a firm foothold on external markets even right here in the Caribbean. In this regard it is apposite to note that, as far as we are aware, the vast majority of our small businesses that have made inroads into external markets have done so with little if any real help from the state. It has been for the most part a manifestation of the success that they have realised in product quality and presentation, not least packaging and labelling.
Here we will repeat briefly the point we have made many times before about the abysmal failure of government, the lending sector, and the Business Support Organizations, to help provide the owners of micro and small businesses with the various types of support that they need to go forward. Government’s culpability has been, over time, located in its proclivity for propaganda-driven lip service that never really goes anywhere and more specifically for its overwhelming failure over many decades to even remotely transform promises to work towards the creation of lucrative markets for these small and micro businesses abroad as other countries, some of them right here in the Caribbean, have done.
How much of a difference scores of thriving small businesses in these sectors would have made to the country’s economy as a whole is, of course, difficult to estimate off the top of our head. What is certain is that had many of these enterprises tasted success even within the limits of the scale of their operations, that success would have made a difference to many families and by extension to many more lives; and since the records will show that the rise of the agroprocessing sector, particularly, brought considerable numbers of working class Guyanese into the entrepreneurial ‘game’, one can argue that had they been afforded the opportunity to grow and prosper they would have almost certainly contributed to the achievement of the poverty alleviation goal of which government speaks so glibly.
The available evidence suggests that such growth as has been realised in the private sector has accrued overwhelmingly to the ‘big players’ in the private sector. Lobby- driven discourses between government and local business support organizations are motivated by agendas that never really take account of micro and small enterprises and ( again as we have argued before) the entrenched Business Support Organizations (BSO) have never really demonstrated any sustained inclination to take the very small and micro enterprises along with them.
If women involved in businesses have, in relatively recent years, been inclined to establish organisations designed to give support to womenled businesses, the extent to which these have made a compelling impact is unclear. To be sure, there are a handful of reasonably successful women-run businesses in Guyana. As it happens, however, there are far greater numbers of women who remain outside the perimeters of real entrepreneurship, confined in a great many instances to vending pursuits that, in most instances, never really graduate beyond the stage of day to day ‘grinds’ to keep families going. All of this, mind you, has been taking place against the backdrop of ceaseless official trumpeting about the economic emancipation of women.
Over the years the media have more or less gone along with the charade, making mountains out of state-created molehills about the importance of micro and small enterprises. At the moment there is no particular clarity about the future of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) which organisation, seven years after its creation, has been unable to reach its target of providing 2,000 jobs in two years.
Paradoxically, official and public discourse on economic development has, over the past five years, focussed in large measure on how we fare as far as our oil and gas fortunes are concerned, never mind the fact that there appears to be no clear and coherent transformational path for ordinary Guyanese, never mind the talk about a twenty first century El Dorado.
A historical examination of the ‘talking up’ of small businesses in Guyana is bound to reveal that the chatter has been to a greater extent, about burnishing the image of the political powers-that-be than with using the sector as a poverty-alleviation tool. Few things can be more disheartening than creating (for example) an agro-processing plant in a poor rural community and delivering promises about opportunities for both paid jobs and selfemployment when that factory is ill-equipped with the prerequisites to sustain it. Sometimes we in Guyana tend to turn our backs on our own considerable experience of politics being, in large measure, a game of image-fashioning.