Caribbean Chemicals (Guyana) is currently celebrating its twentieth anniversary as a provider of a range of services and products to Guyana’s agricultural sector. The company, its Managing Director, Victor Pires says, boasts a proud and distinguished record of service to the country’s agricultural sector.
Pires is the son of the legendary Guyanese plant pathologist Joseph Pires whose contribution to research and development in local agriculture through the National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI) is well-known among the older generation of Guyanese farmers and students of the discipline of Agricultural Science. In his heyday, Joseph Pires earned a reputation as one of the world’s most accomplished experts in sugar cane plant pathology and in 1966 he established the first centre of what is now a region-wide service to the agricultural sector in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago.
From its Abercromby street premises, Caribbean Chemicals began to offer agricultural services and products to farmers across the country. Information available on the company indicates that it employs more than 190 persons and generates sales in excess of $100 million. Since 1967, the company has also significantly enhanced its business profile, earning distributorships for several of the most prestigious and respected names in the global agricultural and industrial chemicals industry and expanding its services to other territories in the region.
Victor Pires insists that the region-wide success of Caribbean Chemicals derives from his father’s principled and professional approach to providing services to the agricultural sector. As a professional plant pathologist he entered the field of business with a strong sense of commitment to the growth of the agricultural sector in the Caribbean. Pires says that from the inception his father instilled in the company a sense of service and dedication.
Speaking with Stabroek Business from their Croal street office recently, Victor and his wife Francesca say they embrace the same business culture. “For us it is about service to the sector,” Pires says.
From Pires’ perspective Caribbean Chemicals is more than a successful business venture. It is a literal manifestation of his father’s strategic vision, challenged though not undermined by a fire that destroyed the company’s Nelson Street, Port of Spain premises in 1983 and the death, ten years later, of the company’s founder. By then, Pires says, younger members of the Pires family had already become an integral part of the enterprise. Victor himself migrated to Guyana to head the company’s operations here while his brother, Joe (Jnr) along with a long time company director, Agronomist Harry Seeram assumed control of the Trinidad and Tobago operations. During the 1990s Caribbean Chemicals extended its operations and currently has markets in Suriname and Jamaica.
Pires insists that Caribbean Chemicals “never sells anything which we have not tested ourselves.” Testing is done on farmers’ fields and is conducted side by side with their own products. In other words, Caribbean Chemicals is a company used to putting its reputation on the line. The company’s image as much as its earnings, is rooted in proven results. When you ask Pires about Caribbean Chemicals’ approach to doing business he says that it derives from an understanding of what is at stake. He explains that in a business offering chemicals to the agricultural sector both lives and reputations can be ruined and he has come to develop a keen sense of the extent to which the Guyanese farming community depends on the services that Caribbean Chemicals provides.
Chemicals distributed in Guyana by Caribbean Chemicals Ltd. are imported from reputable international companies in various countries including India, China, Mexico and Brazil. Both Victor and Francesca Pires say, however, that it is as much the services they offer to the agricultural sector as the products that they provide. The growing importance of the region’s agricultural sector and the significance of Guyana as the hub of farming in the Caribbean provide Pires with a clear perspective on the importance of Caribbean Chemicals.
Across the country Caribbean Chemicals boasts 180 distributors of its products and the quality of the results that those products bring is carefully monitored by the company. Pires says he recognizes both the needs and the weaknesses of the local farming community. He believes too that one of the important contributions which Caribbean Chemicals has made has been infusing a higher sense of professionalism into farming in Guyana.
Says Francesca: “People now take plant care and crop care much more seriously than they did before. Farming has had to evolve because the Caribbean imports too much food.” Victor concurs. Apart from everything else he says Guyana’s needs “a better export infrastructure.”
Despite the central role which Guyana plays as a producer of food in the Caribbean, Victor Pires believes that there may well be evidence that interest in the land has diminished. “Cultivated lands have probably been cut by as much as half. If you look around you will find that much of the land that was cultivated in the 1950s is not cultivated today. I believe that much of this has to do with the fact that some crops cannot be mechanized.
After twenty years as head of Caribbean Chemicals operations in Guyana, Pires says he is yet to be persuaded that many Guyanese farmers have actually embraced agriculture as a business. He believes that the traditional approach to “planting and reaping” has given rise to practices that are dangerous to the industry. His chief concern is with the high local demand for cheaper chemicals, “fake chemicals” he calls them which ruin both crops and lives. His concern shows. Fake chemical imports, he asserts, may be an extension of money laundering. Apart from the need for more policing, Pires believes that there is also a need for more public education. “Farmers sometimes go for cheap chemicals and they need to be educated so that they can understand the dangers of the practice,” Pires says.
Pires says providing service to Guyana’s agricultural sector is an ongoing pursuit and one of the company’s current preoccupations is with bio stimulants. Plans are afoot to begin to distribute a product known as Nano Grow in Guyana. Its purpose, Pires says, is to treat seeds to enable the opening up of their receptors in order to realize optimum performance.
Both Victor and Francesca Pires are of the view that Caribbean Chemicals’ strength lies not only in its introduction of products that increase yield in the agricultural sector but in the role which the company has played in teaching farmers to use those products. “We had to change people,” Francesca says.
