In a matter of a handful of months the mood of local agro-processors shifted from the condition of disappointment associated with the official turning down of a request for a subsidy to help fund their participation in last October’s Florida Trade Expo to one that was more upbeat following the decision by government to assign what we are told was a significant subsidy to the attendance of Guyanese small businesses, mostly agro-processors, we understand, at the recently concluded Barbados Agro Fest.
Seemingly seeking to make the point that its turning down of the subsidy request for the Florida event was not an indication that it was unmindful of the fortunes of small businesses, the organizers of the arrangements for local participation in the Agro Fest event ensured that part of the news feed on the event made public locally had to do with the fact that the CEO of G-Invest, Dr. Peter Ramsaroop was travelling to Barbados at the Head of a group of thirty-odd local small businesses, mostly Agro Processors, to attend the Barbados event.
In the course of its considerable interface with local small businesses, mostly modest, female-run Agro Processing enterprises, the Stabroek Business has concluded that this sector could have been far more advanced than it is at this time had the state paid a more generous measure of its attention to its growth and development. Indeed, if we were to name the two most ‘generous’ official contributions by government to the growth and development of the agro processing sector those would be the allocation of the National Stadium that has served to provide a convivial environment for the staging of events that provide one-off markets for Agro Processors and other categories of small business persons and the creation of the Small Business Bureau (SBB) which in our opinion (and here one hesitates to apportion blame for this shortcoming) has, up to this time, made a lesser impact on the growth of small businesses than one might have thought it would make.
All of this has amounted, on the whole, to a tale of decidedly unrealized ambitions, particularly those that have had to do with the creation of more prominent footprints for small businesses (in the agro-processing sector and elsewhere. Here, it has to be said that while private sector-driven institutions like the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) have, over time, done more than its fair share to support the growth of small businesses, including agro-processors, those state agencies that were meant to serve as drivers of the sector, including the driving force behind the marketing of agro-processed goods, both at home and abroad have been considerable underachievers.
Truth be told, when consideration is given to the global growth of the agro-processing sector and, particularly, its impact on poverty alleviation in this very hemisphere and in other parts of the world the underachievement of Guyana in this regard is particularly pronounced. Indeed, it is as if we have remained altogether oblivious to the steady increase in the numbers of micro and small businesses in the agro processing sector and what this says about important decisions that have been made by ordinary Guyanese about seeking out alternatives to paid employment. Here, their focus is not just on what is a decidedly modest domestic market but also on the much larger international one. Here, of course, they will have to work to overcome standards-related criteria which, up to this time (and despite the efforts of the GNBS) many, perhaps most of our local agro processors are still some considerable distance away from meeting.
There are other mountains that we have to climb too…like the task which the GMC and the other relevant state agencies now have in transforming the various recently established agro processing facilities to be transformed into bustling production Centres that impact, and significantly so on both the variety and volumes of agro produce that they ‘turnout’ as well as the contribution that these facilities make to building partnerships between themselves and the various farming communities in which they have been established. Here, the Ministry of Agriculture, presumably through its satellite entity, the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), must seriously consider an immediate-term comprehensive report on whether or not these facilities have already been involved in production and where they are not, just what the time lines are for doing do.
Here, our insistence on these accountability checks derives from what we have known, historically, to be a seeming lack of official mindfulness for accountability, a proclivity that has cost us billions of dollars in failed projects over the years. Here, we also need to remind ourselves that government’s involvement in attempts to take the country’s agro processing sector has, over the years been nothing to write home about.
Several adjustments are required to the prevailing approach. There is, above all else, the importance of not being tempted (on the understanding that there is money to throw around) to embark on wasteful excursions into projects that are poorly thought out and for which we lack the requisite expertise.
