Arguably, some of the very best years – the growth years – for agro-processing in Guyana were the five or so years prior to the onset of COVID-19. The sector had, by then, not only demonstrated that it had been capable of climbing out of the doldrums of mediocrity (sub-standard products, inept marketing, shabby packaging and labelling and limited market appeal) in which it appeared stuck, but the small investors, themselves, had, in many instances, evinced an impressive inclination to running a small business.
It was the agro-processors, with little or no official support, in the first instance, who had raised themselves off the ground. Prior to the emergence of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) in 2013, determined agro-processing adventurers were already elevating themselves from the ground floor, gradually learning how to put mediocrity behind them, to understand how to enhance the appeal of what they were offering, through quality enhancement and through the raising of standards in the areas of packaging and labelling and by extension through enhancing market appeal.
If all of this was taking place against the backdrop of official plaudits, those continued to be unmatched by commensurate material support. The advent of the SBB may have created an opening under which limited numbers of small businesses could be mobilised and offered nominal support. As it happened, however, no one can argue that the SBB has been a catalyst for dramatic change as far as the small business sector is concerned. It is under-resourced and otherwise underfunded and since 2013, government has provided little persuasive evidence that it is serious about using the Bureau as a critical medium for change as far as the well-being of the small business sector is concerned.
All of the available evidence suggests, for example, that what has been the impressive growth of the agro- processing sector, has been largely due to the resourcefulness of the agro-processors themselves. During the past few years they have been seized of an awareness of what they can accomplish pretty much on their own. While they have benefitted from a handful of public and private-sector-staged Farmers’ Markets and other public events, the reality is that government, over the past seven years, has invested only minimally in their sector. The biggest official failure being the refusal to invest in product enhancement at the domestic level and in aggressive marketing at the external level.
It is difficult, these days, to read the minds of the many hundreds of local agro-processors whose enterprises have now been brought to a shuddering halt and who have no clear idea as to whether they can recover. Here, it is a question of the effort it takes for these intrepid entrepreneurs to bounce back and just how much help they can anticipate from government in doing do.
Agro-processing may not be the only economic sector facing challenges at this time, but there is evidence that an increasing number of previously unemployed persons have invested heavily in the sector in recent years and that greater numbers of ‘coastlanders’ are using the vehicle of agro processing as a form of employment. But perhaps most significantly, agro-processing offers unquestionable and significant opportunities for Guyana to access a significantly expanded share of the international market and help grow the businesses of the investors in the sector.
That will only happen, however, if government nails its colours to the mast of the agro-processing sector without further delay.
