For Guyana to be successful in its agricultural development a detailed study of problems at each step of the production and marketing chain must be done by a carefully put together working group comprising farmers, exporters, sector entrepreneurs, government and donors.
This is the view of Jerry La Gra, former country director of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and now executive officer of S-SOS, an NGO dedicated to technology transfer. He believes that very little is being done to methodically study each issue with a view to finding solutions to the main constraints. He said success will require a continuous plan executed over five to ten years.
La Gra said that there is a tendency in the country to decide to grow a certain crop and target it for export without the requisite research of all the issues involved. He said that as a result the project may fail within two to three years.
“We have land, water and sunshine, giving Guyana a comparative advantage, but [success] could only be achieved through planning and solutions to the problems that exist. You are never going to solve all the problems but you can look at those for certain key produce – you need to prioritise,” he said, adding that there needs to be a shortlist of five or so products chosen based on production and market advantages. “Then you must do a detailed analysis of each part of the system to determine causes of those problems. Only at that point you can identify the solutions. These will be medium to long term solutions,” La Gra said.
According to La Gra, Guyana should draw up land classification maps showing what can be grown where so that potential investors will know which areas are likely to suffer from flooding and other adverse conditions. He said that Guyana tends to have a top-down approach instead of a bottom up one, where the farmers determine the scale and volume of their production to suit the markets.
He said that people talk about Guyana being the breadbasket of the Caribbean that this is because Guyana has plenty land and water scare items in most of the other Caribbean nations. “Guyana has always had a comparative advantage because of the land and water, but in reality, Guyana has a lot of constraints. Many of the farmers have to transport by water and over very rough roads,” he said.
La Gra is of the view that many of the problems that the farmers face have to do with the scarcity of inputs.
Storage
He said too that when you take a good quality product and transport it the quality degrades and it is then hard to market that product for a premium price on the international market due to post harvest damage. He said that the farmers in Guyana have little suitable storage and limited access to proper packaging and the products lose value as a result.
La Gra said that transportation, packaging and fuel costs add to the woes of the farmers since the latter also sends up the cost of the others. He said that safe and timely transportation also presents a problem for the dairy industry.
Late last year, local entity Moogoodies Food Company scaled back on the value-added efforts made in the production of yogurt, flavoured milk and cheese. The company said that high prices of milk caused the commodity to become scare for their production and thus the shift to primary production.
La Gra said that in almost any region outside of Regions 3 and 4, access to farm inputs is limited since there are a limited number of suppliers and these tend to import only items that they can sell on a high volume basis. Therefore, unless the farmer wants a huge amount of the fertiliser or chemical, he won’t be able to access it. Further, La Gra said that specialised fertiliser is hard to find.
He said too that the prices for inputs have increased. “If you can’t find the inputs your products will be infested by pests and diseases resulting in low quality,” he said.
He explained that there is a lack of technology transfer. “Farmers in the hinterland of Guyana seem to be 20 to 30 years behind in technology and a lot of the resources available in other countries are not available in Guyana,” he said.
La Gra added that Guyana hasn’t done a good enough job in transferring technology in terms of soil and seed analysis, water management and adding value. He said too that farmers do not have access to reliable soil analysis services. “If the farmers don’t know what the soil conditions are, then he would be guessing in the application of fertilisers and chemicals,” he said, adding that guessing is as bad as throwing money away.
“Under those conditions it is difficult to produce high levels of products and high quality products,” he said. He explained that although yields can be high, the quality can still be low. “If you are producing 1,000 lbs and only exporting 400 lbs, it means that 600 lbs is left back,” he said, emphasising that quality is more important than large volumes.
He explained that Guyana exports probably 100 different products but in very low volumes for a country’s Guyana’s size and each product needs special attention “so success is not easy.”
Successes
He said that the number one export of a non-traditional product is the Heart of Palm, a commodity that grows wild and for which a company saw the opportunity to process and add value to. “We have to think of adding value to the products in Guyana,” he emphasised.
He said that by preserving and adding value to products through the utilisation of technology, the transportation constraint can be overcome.
The technology, he said, is being used successfully somewhere in the world and it is up to persons to find it and apply it here, making modifications along the way to suit the conditions in Guyana.
Additionally, La Gra spoke of a project in the Rupununi that he was instrumental in establishing where peanut was made into a thriving cottage industry manufacturing peanut butter. He said that the technology was transferred successfully after some modification and that the returns made from one unit of peanuts are high. He also spoke of a successful project in Lethem which processed cashew nuts.
Investment
La Gra said that were he an investor, he would look for a country that is near to the markets he serves. “There has to be land, water needed to grow the product I want to market. It must have basic infrastructure – roads, bridges, containerised and air transport and communication. I would choose a country which has the institutional support services for the transfer of technology, one that has the equipment, fertiliser, seeds etc,” he said.
He also emphasised the need for solid human resources in the agriculture sector and noted that middle management in the sector in Guyana is lacking.
He noted that Guyana’s capacity for airfreight export is limited and its containerised services are uncompetitive for the North American market when compared to other countries in the hemisphere, like Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. Further, he said that because of the volcanic make-up of the soils in these countries, use of fertilisers isn’t as necessary as here, cutting down on costs of inputs.
Another constraint that La Gra identified is the lack of investment by farmers into large, plantation-style farms whose volumes could serve establishments like Topco Juice, which he said still has to import much of the product needed for its juice production because of insufficient supplies locally.
“For some reason, farmers are not investing in these crops which already have markets…I believe they don’t have the technology and farm inputs needed,” he said, adding that there is also little access to capital at fair market prices.
For the dairy industry, La Gra said Guyana has great potential for the growing of quality grass and for the grazing of cattle with its land and water resources. “But cattle do not do very well when they are wading through water and when they are diseases. Although there are comparative advantages, there are also some disadvantages”.
