Guyana’s predominantly small-scale, agro-processing enterprises continue to face inevitable and serious material and technical deficiencies that retard their development and slow the pace of their emergence as a major economic sector.
Several of those hurdles confronting the sector were outlined in a presentation to last Friday’s forum agro-processing held at the International Conference Centre by Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Agricultural Health and Food Specialist, Dr Maxine Parris-Aaron.
In a presentation that generated energetic discourse outside the formal setting of the forum Dr Parris-Aaron focussed chiefly on the inability of the sector to secure the machinery and technical expertise necessary to sustain it on account of the mainly modest individual investments that have so far been made in the sector. The IICA official said that financial limitations had also placed constraints on the ability of agro-processors to make significant investments in packaging and labelling and clearly identifying “markets requirements, standards, guidelines and protocols.”
Last Friday’s forum, convened by the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) to facilitate discourse amongst stakeholders on possible collaborative initiatives that could move the sector forward also explored ways in which collaboration between manufacturers of value-added products and raw materials could be improved.
In her presentation Dr Parris-Aaron also alluded to the production problems being experienced by manufacturers on account of “inadequate and inconsistent supply of raw materials.” Agro-processors who attended the forum endorsed the view that unreliable raw material supplies was one of the major constraints to reliable production flows.
Local agro-processing, according to Dr Parris-Aaron, suffers, simultaneously, from “saturation of the available local market” and “inadequate data” with which to make “informed decisions about marketing and distribution conditions that give rise to far too limited market options…
Meanwhile Dr Parris-Aaron is of the view that efforts to establish viable businesses in the agro-processing sector were also being affected by conflicts in laws governing the registration of businesses and Friendly Societies and in adequate staffing levels to enable the provision of information for monitoring and audit purposes.
With agro-processing activities now in evidence in regions across the country Dr Parris-Aaron also cited ‘inadequate transportation linkages to local and overseas markets” and in adequate “harvesting and storage facilities” as being among other significant constraints to the growth of the sector.
IICA, according to Dr. Parris-Aaron had, over the years, been involved in several initiatives aimed at building capacity in the local agro-processing sector and improving market access. She cited the Institute’s collaboration with the Food and Drugs Department of the Ministry of Health to train agro-processors in food safety, the provision of hands-on practice in product development in collaboration with the Guyana School of Agriculture, the establishment of a Network of Women Agro-Processors and the provision of training programmes in “pricing of commodities, record-keeping and micro-enterprise development as being among the initiatives which IICA had undertaken with a view to supporting the sector.
The sector, Dr. Parris-Aaron said, had also benefitted from “participation in regional and international fora to build capacity in price negotiations and participating in local and overseas exhibitions which facilitated exposure to markets.”
