The recently launched consultations by the government on the cost of living are useful insofar as they make a real attempt to gauge from the grass roots the items that produce sticker shock and the structural problems that result in undue price increases.
The ministers have made their visits and a brief report should be compiled for immediate action. Hopefully, the exercise will not disintegrate into quietude and nothingness as there have been genuine concerns post-VAT in January 2007 and more recently over the general cost of living. The strike by Berbice sugar workers was a sign that people are in no mood to be fobbed off and in the case of sugar workers they face the longstanding dilemma which has been insoluble and which their unions have not made sufficiently serious efforts to address: what happens in the out of crop season when `catching their hand’ and the odd fish in the backdam is all that is available?
Leaving aside the question of the volatile stratospheric price of fuel and its knock-on effect on commodity prices, the immediate task of the government and its agricultural agencies is to find a pathway towards cheaper food particularly the type that has to be imported and is now gouging out a large portion of the disposable income of the masses.
The agricultural history of the country is replete with folklore and myth about English potatoes, onions and produce rotting in the interior. The time is now and considering that President Jagdeo is pioneering a Caricom agricultural initiative in his name there is a special onus on Guyana to show that it can lead the way. The regional agri-business investment forum to be held here in June will be a key test of whether Caricom is serious about moving on agriculture.
Despite the Agriculture Ministry’s declared intention to transform the sector with vastly increased exports of non-traditional items such as the four Ps, in terms of domestic consumption there are still too many areas that have gone untouched thereby triggering the ‘agflation’ that has hit the pockets of the average man. Food items like onions continue to be imported in huge quantities. Where are the enterprising private sector agriculturalists suitably encouraged by the ministry and its agricultural research and extension arms?
Just as an aside, last week in the Barbados Nation, a St Lucy farmer was lamenting that he had no market for a thousand bags of onions he had grown. Arthur Smith charged that onions were being imported duty-free and sold to supermarkets thereby causing a glut.
“The manufacturers are bringing in onions cheaply from Europe. People might say the ones that are imported are cheaper than the ones we are producing but we do not get the subsidy or grants that those farmers get. Other markets are getting farm support and it will be difficult for us to sell our commodity at the same price as the imported ones,” he told the Nation. The newspaper said its investigations revealed that while a bag of imported onions sell for Bds$35, a bag of locally produced ones sold for Bds$55. And showing the value of market information, the minute the report was published Bajans descended on the farm and snapped up the 250 available bags.
It is clearly the type of problem from the outset that could defeat local growers particularly given the preference of customers here for foreign goods. The trials and tribulations of some farmers in the savannahs is a cautionary tale about the farming environment here. Despite large investments and blood, sweat and tears some of these ventures have failed as a result of poor infrastructure in the area, absence of a maintained transportation network and bureaucratic hindrances.
One of the starting points for the government’s intervention must be thumbing through the list of food imports to determine which ones can be immediately cultivated on a large enough scale to satisfy local demand and eventually to enable exports. Expanding rice cultivation is an obvious opening. While the butternut squash has been held up as a breakthrough in meeting the needs of the international market it has not become a staple on the local food table and cannot be compared to the impact of the humble onion or potato.
As to the latter, the potato in all of its forms whether the ‘English’ variety in the highlands of the hinterland or the local sweet potatoes are increasingly attractive because of the global food demand and bio fuel uses.
Flours derived from such potatoes are rising on the radar again as substitutes for wheat flour; another eminently suitable area for the government to attract investment interest.
And it is not only at the level of the large investor. As has been done here before and is still clearly on the agenda the average household can make some impact on their food bill if they put a little effort in. The government has constantly addressed this issue but not enough families have taken it on board. Last week, the Jamaican Minister of Agriculture Christopher Tufton declared that the food import bill was out of hand and that consumers had to decrease their dependence on imports. Sixty-one per cent of the country’s basic food items were imported. Maybe the local Stats Bureau can provide the updated figure for Guyana. It is a national scandal that the bureau has stopped issuing monthly bulletins on the consumer price index and it raises questions about transparency and whether the bureau and the government recognize that information is critical to the proper functioning of all markets.
Jamaica’s food import bill has zoomed from US$479M in 2002 to US$662M up to November last year. As a result, Tufton announced a food-planting project which will see vegetable seeds being distributed to students from grades 8 to 11. He estimated that by planting two cycles of tomato, cucumber, sweet pepper and pak choi the average householder would save J$12,000 annually.
It isn’t for the populace to sit back and lament their plight without taking independent action to ease the food squeeze. Nevertheless the government has a huge role to play in this age-old enterprise of trying to attract investment in agricultural production while at the same time encouraging households to help themselves.
