If external assessments of Guyana hardly, if ever, fail to make reference to the country’s poverty-related deficiencies, arguably the most powerful boost from which our international image commonly benefits is our ability to feed ourselves and to provide for some of the food needs of other countries, notably our fellow Caribbean Community member countries.
It is a credential for which the country as a whole takes considerable credit, though one sometimes feels that our farmers, the people who work hard to keep our reputation as the least reliant of all of the countries in the region on imported foods intact, do not, on the whole, get all of the recognition that they have earned for what they have done for the image of the country. That, we believe, has to change significantly.
As COVID-19 ravages the globe, indications are that our farmers are making their point again, placing us in a position where we are light years removed from that clutch of ‘poor’ countries which, reputable international organizations say, are in danger of being devoured by a food crisis to go along with the emergency, compliments of the coronavirus, in which they are already immersed.
There is a lesson to be learnt here from the fact that what, in the present circumstances, is an already bad situation, would have been even more dire if we had had to address the added challenge of looking outside of Guyana in order to feed ourselves. The present circumstances, therefore, provide lessons from which the state and the populace, equally, must learn. At both levels, there is a need to first ask ourselves whether there continues to be sufficient attention paid to all-round investment in agriculture that embraces all of the various assets of land management, cultivation, crop care, harvesting and marketing of our agricultural produce.
The jury, frankly, is still out on some of these issues, particularly when you engage hard-working farmers who, amidst their toil, most worry about availability of arable lands, crop management, pests, farm to market roads, and the reaping, transporting and marketing of their produce. It is, in some instances, a constant, arduous grind to cover all of these bases and the fact that our farmers do this, not only for themselves, but in order to ensure that all of us can continue to lay claim to the attendant bragging rights is something which does not attract anywhere near the attention that it deserves.
If there is something to be said for the recent disclosure by the Ministry of Agriculture that it has embarked on an initiative designed to promote and support kitchen gardens, is that we need to go far beyond such programmes at this time. For example, some of those modest agro-processing ventures that have fought their way through various hellish obstacles and were beginning to enjoy some of the light at the end of the tunnel are being set back by the coronavirus outbreak. Many of these small agricultural/agro-processing ventures were nurtured largely through the work of the Small Business Bureau. Therefore it is government’s responsibility to do everything in its power to ensure that those enterprises, which had done so much to enhance the self-esteem of the owners, do not die.
There had been and perhaps still is a vigorous discourse regarding whether the country’s new-found oil resources might somehow cause us to place less value on the agricultural sector. What, hopefully, we have learnt from the vagaries of the global oil market is that while oil can bring dramatic, sometimes spectacular transformation to countries, the fluctuations of the industry and the volatility that it often manifests means that, in a sense, it does not present anywhere near the sense of comfort associated with the knowledge that what we have and are already in control of, can, if properly managed, ensure that going hungry is not a fear that should apply in our country.
It is therefore not just a question of our agricultural sector long having made a case for recognition as one of our critical assets but also of the sector attracting the attention and the resources that it has earned. If the vagaries of social distancing preclude us these days (hopefully for not much longer) from benefitting from the immense emotional comfort of mountains of fruit and vegetables in our crowded municipal markets, we can at least reflect on the reality and recognise that our ability to feed ourselves, a blessing that has been denied many other countries, is not a facility that should be taken for granted. One of the discourses that has been triggered by the coronavirus and the need for a comprehensive national response is the importance of creating a robust national IT infrastructure, which, one might add, can itself contribute to the growth of the agricultural sector in various ways.
The point that should be made here, however, it that all too often the thoughts and actions of our decision-makers are frequently so deeply buried in clouds of grandiose ‘development’ projects, that they find themselves light years away from better empowering the farmer, pressing on in some distant field in the midst of the most challenging conditions in order to keep what remains our brightest star shining.
