One of the important lessons that we surely ought to have learnt about the agro-processing sector is that despite the still limited merited attention that it enjoys in terms of official support for its growth and development, its role in transforming what we in Guyana refer to as ‘hustlers’ into substantive businesspersons cannot be swept aside.
More to the point, the beneficiaries from the growth of the sector, have been, to a considerable extent, working class women who, in many if not most instances, used agro-processing as a tool through which to seek to make their way out of abject poverty. In a sense, the time and resources which those women devoted to their agro-processing start-ups were hardly investments in the conventional sense of the term, but, in effect, leaps of faith that offered no iron-clad assurances of meaningful material returns. What these women brought to the table, mostly, was no more than a determination to find an avenue through which they could subsidize their family incomes.
