By Rawle Lucas (Rawle Lucas is a Guyanese-born Certified Public Accountant and Assistant Vice President of the Lending Services Division.
Mr. Lucas has agreed to serve as a columnist with the Stabroek Business and will be contributing articles on economic, financial and development matters.)
Reluctant
It reads like the scores of the West Indies batting line up. One batsman impresses with a score of 83 and then others provide uninspiring knocks of 33, 9, 14 11, 25, 32, 7, 31 and 39 without a chance to surpass the competition. As an avid fan, imagine how lousy you would feel when your favourite batsman does not get among the runs and players that you expect to do well fail. With batsmen under performing game after game, you wonder, with feint hope, if they would do better next time. And, the next time comes around and things do not improve. You feel the reluctant need to give the offending players another opportunity in the hopes that they would turn their performance around. Despite the additional opportunities, things do not improve. You decide that it is time for a change. You look to the selectors of the West Indies team for help and eventually get it. New players replace the poor performers while existing players who are performing well remain on the team.
State of Production
The only problem is those scores referred to above do not come from the West Indian batsmen, even though some readers might strongly challenge my denial. Those scores represent the performance of the agricultural sector in Guyana last year. They are indices pulled from the 2008 annual report of the Bank of Guyana (BOG) and they give an indication of the state of production of several farm products in the country. With the use of these indices, Guyanese can determine if the output of certain agricultural crops was expanding or if it was contracting. The way the indices are set up they give Guyanese a chance to see how production has changed every year since 2000. The indices serve as a good barometer of economic activity in Guyana and help justify the complaints of Guyanese about life in the country.
The indices referred to above relate to the production of items like sugar, coconut, cassava, ground provisions, plantains, banana, mango, pineapple, citrus, cereals and legumes, eschallot, bora and eggs in 2008. These are some of the agricultural food products about whose performance the administration has chosen to report on to the nation. Only two crops, the well-known rice and the little-known coffee, increased production over the 2000 level. Every other crop experienced significant decline. It is hard to believe that a country that produced these commodities in large and exportable quantities has allowed production of so many commodities to fall so far and so fast below the levels at which they were in the year 2000 and even way back in 1992.
Rare
If the supply of these items look plentiful now to the naked eye, it is because those watching might be unaware of the bounty of these commodities in prior years. It is unimaginable that the production of eschallot, for example, has fallen by an alarming 93 percent between 2000 and 2008. The production of cassava, something also used to add taste and variety to our diet, has declined by 91 percent since 2000. The sighting of peas, bananas and mangoes is becoming rare. The production of these three items has fallen by 90 percent, 76 percent and 69 percent respectively over the years. The production of the tasty bora has fallen by 67 percent and the production of eggs has fallen by 35 percent over the same eight-year period.
Neglect
This administration has been in power for most of the 17 years that there has been a change of government. During this period, the food security of Guyanese diminished and many fellow citizens went hungry or had to exclude certain items from the lunch or dinner menu because they could not afford to buy them. In many instances, the output of some food crops was greater in 1992 than it was in 2008. Plantain is one example. The output of plantain was six times greater in 1992 than it was last year. Another item is pineapple. The output of pineapples was nearly seven times greater in 1992 than it was last year. There are other foods that are in distress as well. The output of coconuts, bananas and even sugar was much higher in 1992 than it was in 2008.
These numbers reflect a consistent neglect of food production, inattentiveness to the food security of the country and the absence of a well thought out agricultural policy. In almost all cases, the fall in production is a consistent annual pattern of neglect of the agricultural sector because output levels have gotten worse year in and year out. Guyanese have had many years to see this performance and like they would feel with the failing West Indian batsman should feel that this administration has let them down.
The evidence has been there for the administration to see for all these years. Yet, no effort was made to mobilize significant resources and support for the small farmers of Guyana who are central to food production. Instead, great emphasis was placed on hoping that large foreign investments would be attracted to the country under what is often referred to as the “Jagdeo Initiative”. Nothing is wrong with pursuing the “Jagdeo Initiative”, but there is also need for alternatives in case that initiative fails as appears to be happening right now. While it waits for that initiative to take hold, there is a need for this administration to recognize that it should work with Guyanese farmers and investors, big and small, to bring food production out of the doldrums in which it currently finds itself.
No Need to Wait
There is no need to wait on the rest of the world or the Caribbean. The administration should recognize also that there is nothing wrong with pursuing aggressively the objective of feeding, clothing and housing the people of Guyana. Though this sensible goal is associated with the opposition People’s National Congress (PNC), the current administration should recognize the wisdom and value of the objective to the wellbeing of Guyanese. Instead of running away from the objective, it should try to prove to Guyanese that it knows how to pursue the goal better.
Not only would the pursuit of this objective help to create jobs and contribute to an alleviation of poverty, it would create the foundation for economic expansion and add to the economic wealth of Guyanese. As the economy grows from the economic activities generated from food production and food processing, clothing production and housing construction, Guyanese could become better off, especially if resource allocations are managed well. There would be less need for Guyanese to leave the shores of Guyana and seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Frustrating
It is clear from the deterioration of the drainage and irrigation system and the removal of the special agricultural financing and farm support programme that food production was not an important objective of this administration. If it were, the administration would have built up the institutional framework to strongly support small business farms. These entities are not receiving adequate technical and financial support, like rice and sugar do, to sustain faith in their efforts. Just imagine how frustrating it is for farmers to see their lands flooded involuntarily every year and they lose their crops and livestock as a consequence of neglected public infrastructure. Just imagine how they feel when they cannot get agricultural credit at reasonable rates to tide them over or to finance their small but vitally important operations. That feeling is worse than when some of our batsmen turn in poor performances.
If this administration stood in the shoes of ordinary Guyanese, it might just realize that the answer to many of its problems is breathing and walking all around it. It is hard to believe that the administration does not realize that.
