If you want to get a compelling sense of the wide variety of fruit cultivated on farms across Guyana you can do worse to travel to Roy Boodhoo’s 131-acre farm aback of Parika at Hubu, on the East Bank of the Essequibo river. The sprawling plantation, literally an agro processors’ dream, offers up crops of soursop, limes, lemons, tangerines and coconuts, so plentifully that try as he seemingly does the demand for what Boodhoo’s farm yields is simply not sufficient to match the bounty provided by the land.
Roy used to be a cattle farmer but all that is behind him now. He has been farming for the past nine years and now the bounty has simply overwhelmed him.
The farm is not idle. It is operational. Roy is up early each morning either to visit the farm or head for the market to sell what he can. He concedes, however, that market limitations have, these past few months, provided him with sorry little incentive to visit the farm. It is, he says, simply not worth the effort. It is preferable to simply leave the fruit to rot. This time around he is anticipating heavy losses on coconut, citrus and soursop.
