Like hundreds of other Guyanese who have been operating modest business enterprises during 2020, Vasil Wood believes that the experience of having to do business in the destabilising environment of COVID-19 may well have taken him to a critical fork in his entrepreneurial road. The sixty-year-old pig farmer who lives and plies his trade at Good Intent, Mahaica, is almost certainly one of biggest operators in the industry on the East Coast corridor; and while not appearing to be someone given to needless complaining, he concedes that the year that has just gone by has been a testing one for him.
It was a year during which, simultaneously, the respective prices of feed and pork ‘took off’ in separate directions, so that in one fell swoop his overheads shot up and his returns dipped sharply.
It is not, Vasil says, a matter of “getting out of the business.” Giving up a pursuit which has enabled you to make a good living for more than thirty years is not the kind of decision that you can make at the proverbial drop of a hat. Still, when you are in business there are unpalatable realities that must be faced.
