The Stabroek Business has had some decidedly encouraging feedback from two recent events held here in the region, the first being the high profile 25 x 2025 product promotion and consultative event held in Guyana primarily to allow for a collaborative look at how to respond to the challenge of a preponderance of foods from outside the Caribbean that are imported into the region. Here it should be noted that the 25 x 2025 event attracted the in-person attendance of at least four CARICOM Heads of Government and further, that the end-of-forum pronouncements sought to provide assurances that regional Heads will be seeking to bring a greater sense of urgency to the assignment of reducing food imports from outside the region. We must wait and see.
Following on the heels of the Guyana event came Barbados’ National Agricultural Exhibition which again saw a coming together of Caribbean territories not just to secure a better understanding of what Barbados brings to the collective regional effort but also to seek to better understand just what the Community, as a whole, can offer to its member countries.
Here again there was evidence of a sense of seriousness, even intensity and as we learnt from the President of the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA) one of the outcomes of the Barbados event was the establishment of even closer links between Guyana and Barbados in the matter of aggressively pursuing what has now become the decidedly urgent issue of regional food security.
Having followed both the Guyana and Barbados events closely this newspaper formed the distinct opinion that the engagements and their outcomes sent a message of greater seriousness (or at least so it seemed) to the region as a whole with regard to its food-security vulnerabilities particularly when these are viewed against the backdrop of the more global food insecurity considerations as well as the region’s own particular vulnerability to climate change. As an aside one senses the visit here by the Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley for the Guyana event may have served to trigger the beginning of the end of the long-standing fracas between the two countries on the issue of access for Guyanese products to the Trinidad and Tobago market.
Without being able to pursue, as yet, a thorough investigation into how the events of the past several weeks may have impacted on Guyanese small businesses, particularly in the agro-processing sector we have been left with the impression based on conversations with two local agro processors who benefitted from exposure through both the Guyana and Barbados events, that what the two events succeeded in doing is acknowledging the role that the agro processing has to play in the region’s wider food security pursuits. What came out clearly from our conversations with them was the fact that Guyana’s agro processing sector has provided more than sufficient reason to cause both government and the private sector to throw much more of their weight behind this sector by moving with due haste to respond to its various well-known needs which have been known for many years.
One makes this point being acutely aware of the recent surge of public spending on concerns that have to do with some of the less well-positioned sections of the society including, we have noted, beneficiaries in the agriculture sector. If there is nothing wrong with these various ‘feel good’ initiatives it is important that they be transformed into longer-term, life-changing accomplishments.
There are a whole host of reasons why Guyana’s agro processing sector should now come in for some level of special attention from our ‘oil’ economy. The first has to do with the number of persons who are employed in one facet or another of the sector while the second has to do with what is often the hugely underestimated contribution which agro processing makes to food security in Guyana. There are other reasons why our agro-processing sector should be encouraged to grow; like its contribution to making available differently prepared local foods, promoting local fruits and vegetables as part of our diets in different ways and, of course, showcasing local products in the region (and further afield) not just as a contribution to regional food security but also as a means of providing options for consumers outside of the region.
It is not the opinion of this newspaper that the authorities have done anywhere near enough to raise the profile of agro processing particularly when account is taken of the game changing role it can play both in the context of the country’s wider economy as well as in the domain of the well-being of ordinary Guyanese from whom many if not most of the ideas that generate high-quality end products come.
The Small Business Bureau, designed to respond to the material and training needs of ‘small men and women’ with entrepreneurial ambitions, we repeat, official criticism notwithstanding, our view that the Bureau, even up to this time, has not only failed to accomplish its own job-creation targets set several years ago but also that the rapid growth of the small business over the past decade and more has left the Bureau hobbled in terms of its ability to respond.
At this stage, there being manifest evidence that the Bureau is nowhere nearly adequately equipped to meet the needs of an expanding small and micro business sector, particularly those in the agro-processing sector we believe that there is a clear case for channelling more resources into the agency given, of course, that the requisite structures are in place to ensure that the agency is equipped to make the soundest decisions with regard to allocating funding, training and operating guidance to the significant numbers of small businesses in the agro processing and other sectors that are emerging in Guyana today.
Nor do we shirk one bit from our view that a state institution that is designed specifically to support private sector growth in Guyana, which, unquestionably, is what the Small Business Bureau is, ought not to be ‘shadowed’ by a state agency, a government ministry, to booth, leaden-footed as these have become on account of the proliferation of bureaucrats who, not infrequently, are inclined to make critical business related decisions against backdrops which frequently have to do with entirely different considerations. Decision making within the Small Business Bureau should be made by professionals who have a clear sense of the need to be properly positioned to ensure that small businesses become a bona fide part of the mainstream economy rather than continue to dwell precariously its periphery.
