Marketing Guyana’s agricultural potential in the region

The news that Guyana’s prospects of a commercially viable oil find may have risen in the wake of the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) arbitral award in Guyana’s maritime dispute with Suriname passed with little public fanfare here. Part of the reason for the matter-of-fact public response has to do with previous experience. We have, in the past, allowed our hopes to soar on the basis of reports of likely oil finds only to have those hopes dashed shortly thereafter.

And even if we were to ignore the lessons of the past and allow our hopes to rise prematurely again, the indications from CGX Energy are that it will be two years before any drilling operation begins.

In the meantime, however, another window of economic opportunity appears to have opened up in a more familiar sector of our economy. Rising global food prices have brought Guyana’s potential as a food producer into even sharper regional focus in recent months. Other CARICOM member countries have been making little secret of Guyana’s strategic importance as the region’s only net exporter of food.

On Wednesday September 26, at a seminar organized by the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-INVEST) Barbados Deputy Prime Minister Mia Mottley made an impressive case for the importance of Guyana’s agricultural sector since, she argued, the region’s rising food import bill is altogether unsustainable. It was one of those presentations that deserved a much larger audience than the sizeable Barbados private sector delegation, a handful of Guyanese businessmen, representatives of GO-INVEST and Ministers Robert Persaud and Manniram Prashad.

Deputy Prime Minister Mottley’s address is not the first recent indication that the region is becoming more and more interested in Guyana’s agricultural sector. Trinidad and Tobago reportedly has an interest in making a sizeable investment in local agriculture while other CARICOM states appear to be either increasing the volume of their agricultural imports from Guyana or positioning themselves to do more business with local farmers.

The point about all this is that regional attention is now turned fully in the direction of Guyana and what its agricultural sector can offer the region and it is now up to both the government and the private sector to market what Guyana has to offer both in terms of agricultural exports and in terms of possible joint venture investments in our agricultural sector involving regional entrepreneurs and Guyanese businessmen.

One aspect of doing business abroad that continues to bedevil Guyana is the effective marketing of our goods and services and there appears to be an awareness at the levels of both the Minister of Agriculture and the Chief Executive Officer of GO-INVEST that the effective marketing of the country’s agricultural sector including its agro-processing potential is critical to securing more markets in the region and attracting more regional investments in the sector.

But an awareness of what is needed is not enough. Nor is it sufficient to have the Minister or some other official in the sector simply make an erudite presentation to potential investors. If we are to sell our agricultural sector to regional (and extra-regional) markets and attract regional investment in both farming and agro-processing , we have to be prepared to invest in designing, packaging and executing a professionally conceptualized marketing programme that uses the various communication tools both to take our marketing programme to the region and to bring potential investors and buyers here. A marketing exercise of that kind must take account of the need to provide information on the local business climate, incentives for investors, and the suitability of locations for particular agricultural products. At the same time such a marketing programme should take account of the health-related and other import regulations of the countries that are being targeted.

Our marketing strategy should also include inviting potential investors from the region to visit Guyana to see actual farms and farming locations, and to interact with farmers to examine the conditions in the sector for themselves.

There is also the need to focus attention on the agro-processing sector and the support that joint venture and independent regional investment initiatives can bring to the sector both in terms of technical support and investment capital. And then there is need to package the information professionally and to present it in a manner that ensures that it responds to all the likely issues that may be raised by investors.

Part of the problem with marketing Guyana’s products and services is that there always seems to be little money around for marketing – a point that is borne out by the circumstances of the Guyana Tourism Authority. In this regard we need look no further than Barbados where the marketing of the island is unquestionably one of its most important economic activities . The fact of the matter is that if we are not in the business of marketing we are not in the business of selling and if we are not in the business of selling then frankly, we are simply not in business.