A businessman with whom this newspaper talked earlier this week spoke eloquently for the numerous ‘bottom-house’ manufacturers who have survived and even grown over the years without succeeding in realizing the level of expansion that would set them on a path to real entrepreneurship.
Some of these ‘bottom house’ businesses employ up to about ten people and produce appreciable amounts of mostly processed and bottled fruit – sometimes in a manner that may not pass stringent Food and Drugs tests – which is sold on the local market. Ignorance and a lack of access to knowledge are their real enemies; and in addition to these afflictions, no state agency has actually been able to reach into their corners and touch them.
The businessman chided the Guyana Manufac-turing and Services Association (GMSA) which he said was not doing very much for small manufacturers, suggesting that a few of the association’s members may have now become sufficiently frustrated to want to go their separate ways.
Arguably, it may not be entirely fair to say that small manufacturers have been abandoned. Agencies like the Guyana Office for Investment (Go-Invest) and the New Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) have been giving some measure of support to the sub-sector. Go-Invest has done some work in supporting the overseas marketing pursuits of small manufacturers while the GMC has given a measure of practical support to entities in the agro-processing sector. The point that the businessman was making, however, was that he believed that the potential which the manufacturing sector holds renders it deserving of far more official attention. He made the point, for example, that a separate entity — a Ministry of Manufacturing and Industry — ought to be set up to focus directly on all of the needs of the manufacturing sector including financing, training for entrepreneurs and marketing, which, for more reasons than one, have posed long-standing and serious challenges for local manufacturers.
Without entering too deeply into the merits or otherwise of what the businessman had to say, these ideas are held forth as evidence of some measure of serious and constructive thinking on the part of members of the business community. Indeed, one wonders whether a point has not now been reached where ideas like these – and others which are bandied about from time to time – are not worthy of more serious examination by joint public/private sector think tanks before being put to the government in the form of serious proposals.
The businessman may have been somewhat harsh on the GMSA but at least he has provided some measure of evidence that there is more that the organisation can do.
