Upgraded Guyana Shop, more outlets can grow market for local products

Checking out the craft aisle
Checking out the craft aisle

What transpired at last Sunday’s Guyana Marketing Corporation-staged UncappeD event may well have raised more searching questions about the likely long-term prospects for small and medium-sized businesses in the agricultural agro-processing and craft sub-sectors. The jury would still appear to be out on whether these sub-sectors are growing at a sufficiently steady pace and whether such sloth as attends the rate of growth may not be attributable to remediable challenges that are yet to be properly addressed.

 To understand the real prospects for the entrepreneurial future of these emerging businesses, you have to divest yourself of the distracting and often counterproductive rhetoric and deal squarely with the realities. One of those is that these emerging sectors now stand at a critical crossroads, confronted as they are with challenges, one of which is an insufficient level of real institutional support. 

Now singled out among the local Business Support Organisations (BSO’s) for the support it offers the small business sector as a whole, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) is now moving in the direction of establishing alliances that could well point to a breakthrough for the small businesses that showed up at Providence on Sunday.

UncappeD notwithstanding, however, valid questions remain about the impact of the local agro-processing sub-sector as well as the craft and other local creative industries on either business growth or market expansion. Significantly, the overarching, and these days, repetitive wider private sector noises about the potential local content returns from our emerging oil and gas industry, have not succeeded in completely drowning out the call for greater attention to the manufacturing and creative industries. 

Significantly in our view, of the thirty four opinions sought by the Stabroek Business at Providence on Sunday, twenty three concurred that there was now greater evidence of an increased number of locally produced spices and condiments (there appeared to be less certainty about how the craft, cosmetics and fashion enterprises were faring) being manufactured locally though a fewer number, thirteen, thought that these are far from readily available in local outlets. “This is the first time that I have seen or heard about some of brands on display here,” Shirelle, a Corriverton resident, told this newspaper. 

A less clear picture emerged when visitors to last Sunday’s event were asked to assess the extent to which the local agro-processed range was ‘taking root’ with local consumers. More than half of our respondents indicated that they had made modest “trial” purchases from the range of food flavourings and condiments that were available at Sunday’s UncappeD event. Whilst welcoming the emergence of local options, however, seventeen of our respondents asserted that “for the time being” they were sticking with their customary (imported) options though each of them said that they had not closed their minds to “switching brands” if their preferred local products become readily available. 

Once again, the level of organisation that went into the putting together the UncappeD event meant, crucially, that it attracted the participation of some key agencies including local lending institutions which small businesses have for years, been tirelessly lobbying in an effort to secure a more pleasing lending regime. On Sunday at Providence, thirty one randomly selected agro-processors told this newspaper that their planning and product development work had occurred “without any support from lending institutions.” More than half of these had tried and failed to secure financing from the banking sector. When we raised the issue with an employee in the banking sector present at Providence we were told that whatever the excuses that are given, in the matter of providing financing for “sectors like small scale agro-processing,” local banks remain “heavily risk-averse.” We were further told that “you have to separate the Banks’ PR from the bottom line here.” 

In what remains an emerging sector still “finding its feet,” the role of the state remains a critical issue. While state-funded support mechanisms, including those associated with training of small business owners, grants and lending, through the Small Business Bureau and some level of  official support through the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest)  for agro-processors’ participation in overseas product-promotion events is acknowledged, the feeling clearly persists that there is still insufficient support for the emerging enterprises that are still categorised as part of the small business sector. Calls for an expanded role for the Small Business Bureau, a more vigorous state sector lobby for enhanced commercial bank backing for emerging businesses and direct government investment in infrastructure that can reduce the still existing labour-intensive production and packaging processes, is, from the perspective of the agro-processors, being responded to with a far lesser sense of urgency than is necessary at this time.   

Still, for all the concern and the calls for more support for these emerging sectors, the evidence of a broader enthusiasm for the objectives of the UncappeD event could hardly be concealed. The threat of heavy rain during the earlier hours of Sunday appeared, in the final analysis, to have had no significant impact on the eventual turnout and there was something reassuring about the rapport between visitors to the event, excited about the likely emergence of a new sector to the country’s economy and the local producers, clearly proud as peacocks about the attention the events like UncappeD gets them and their products, to say nothing about the modest but welcome marketing opportunity that they afford. 

UncappeD, on Sunday, appeared far away from the more intense national discourse on the oil & gas threshold on which the country now clearly stands, and in the context of the local private sector, its local content dimension.  In a sense, however, the energy and business so clearly apparent at Providence served as the latest in a succession of reminders regarding the importance of not allowing the country’s new-found good fortune to ignore those sectors which, up until now, have served us with a generous measure of predictability. 

The Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) which is coming much more into its own in terms of support for emerging agro-processors was also represented at Sunday’s UncappeD event. Demand for shelf space at the GMC’s Guyana Shop, we are told, continues to be high. At Providence, on Sunday, however, among both agro- processors and visitors, there was agreement on the importance of state investment in a ‘new look’ Guyana Shop in Georgetown that meets the standard of an upscale supermarket and is able to offer display space for a wider range of the local products. Agro-processors are also seeking the creation of similar additional facilities in other regions in order to boost their market opportunities.  “It’s no use complaining that we are not supporting local products if they are not readily and widely available in many of the regions,” one visitor to the event told Stabroek Business. 

This past year the Stabroek Business has been tracking the evident strides which manufacturers have made in the areas of product packaging and labelling. At UncappeD on Sunday, much of that was exemplified in the various displays. The customary cheap plastic bottles that have long been pressed into service as containers for most products have, to a considerable degree, been replaced by more presentable stock though the product producers are quick to point out that cheaper bottles could push down product prices. Simona Dillon, who had travelled from Region Five to attend the UncappeD event opined that this time around there appeared to be much more evidence that agro-processors are not only pressing a wider range of local raw materials, including fruit, into service, but also that there appears to be a higher level of “experimentation” that has yielded a broader range of products.

As last Sunday’s most recent UncappeD ‘offering’ indicated, the GMSA’s UncappeD event can also take credit for bringing consumers and agro-processors together in a manner that had not occurred for some time. This most recent ‘offering’ of UncappeD, much more than its predecessors, provided “evidence of goods and money changing hands,” a craft vendor told the Stabroek Business. 

If there is an enduring weakness in events like UncappeD, it reposes in the repeated failure to provide enlightening post mortems that can, among other things, offer an assessment of the events’ strengths and weaknesses and plan the way forward. At Providence on Sunday, there appeared to be a consensus on the desirability of events like UncappeD as periodic marketplaces for emerging local businesses and on the need to locate these events in various parts of the country. This is not the first time that the issue of decentralisation for product promotion events has surfaced and it is one which the GMSA and the various other state and non-state organisations that stage these events would do well to bear in mind. 

Markets, of course, as almost all of the product producers pointed out to the Stabroek Business on Sunday, are crucial. What this means is that events like UncappeD cannot be separated from the bigger picture, that is, the need for efforts to create expanded regional and extra-regional markets to be stepped up. That is as much a challenge for government as it is for the private sector.