Having said little in the previous months about the continual unfolding of restrictive regulations in the United States arising out of that country’s enactment of its new food safety legislation and the implications for food exports to the United States, the Government of Guyana has used its 2013 budget presentation to the National Assembly to provide the first significant indication that it is aware of the legislation and its implications.
In his budget speech on Monday, Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh gave notice of “several legislative initiatives” some of which will have to do with “traceability of both crops and livestock” the objective of which, again according to the Finance Minister, is “to fulfill international trade requirements.” Those requirements have to do with laws that continue to be enacted by some of the major metropolitan countries to protect their various consuming publics from food-borne diseases.
The new US food safety regulations are among the most stringent of the various recent sets of conditionalities associated with importing food products into metropolitan countries. What particularly makes them enforceable is the fact that the laws make provision for the US food safety authorities to conduct on-the-spot checks on farms and manufacturing entities in exporting countries to ensure that the processes of cultivation and manufacturing meet the required standards for consumption in the US. Where those standards are not met the authorities will prohibit the importation of foods into the US.
It is a pretty cut and dried situation: compliance or consequence and for some exporters who currently send modest quantities of fruit and vegetables to the US failure to meet the required standards will mean being put out of business altogether; except of course they can move with haste to meet those standards.
What is being suggested in the minister’s announcement is that through the proposed legislation, the government will be requiring exporters to put their respective houses in order or face embargoes that will apply prior to export in order to avoid the embarrassment to the country that will obviously arise if the imports get turned away at the port of entry.
The problem is, of course, that if the government is serious about encouraging private sector export initiatives, particularly those small operations that comprise the numerical majority of exporters to North America, it will have to do much more than simply seek to pass legislation. Bringing farms and manufacturing entities up to speed with the safety and health and technological requirements that will render their goods fit for export to the US will require significant investments in human resources, training and equipment which, manifestly, the vast majority of our exporters cannot afford. This newspaper is only aware of one food exporter, one of the biggest in the business, that has taken any really serious initiative to respond to the requirements of the new US food safety regulations. Most of the others, according to what we are told by the local Food and Drug Administration, are simply not financially equipped to invest in the requirements necessary to meet the standards outlined in the regulations.
The point to be made here is that it is not sufficient for the government to simply say in its budget presentation that new laws have to be passed “to fulfill international trade requirements.” That is much too vague. While legislation will undoubtedly be necessary the process must be attended by a public discourse to say to stakeholders just what these new “international trade requirements” are. More than that if the government acknowledges, as it does, the role of small and medium-scale exporters in job-creation and in the growth of the country’s economy it must allocate funds and/or make possible easy access to lending to help potential exporters in the agriculture and agro-business sector meet the requirements that will help them meet the standards set out in the new US food safety requirements.
