Today’s national agro-processing event being held at the International Conference Centre, Liliendaal is important for several reasons, perhaps the key one being that it provides a stage on which many small manufacturing enterprises – some, first the first time – can bring their products to the attention of a relatively large potential market.
That facility alone could be of considerable longer-term benefit to those micro producers in the sector, some of whom would probably never have experienced that level of exposure before.
The argument for agro-processing as a major economic pursuit in Guyana is not a particularly difficult one to make. Guyana’s large agricultural sector makes the country a prime location for agro-processing. That apart there is the potential of agro-processing to provide employment for significant numbers of people, disadvantaged people, into the bargain. There is also the matter of the significant potential for building the food export market abroad and, of course, the fact that agro-processing does not necessarily require excessive levels of financial investment.
If we define agro-processing as the transformation of primary agricultural products into processed commodities then it would have to be said that the pursuit is not new to Guyana. The primary differences these days, repose, first, in the fact that processing is now far more capital intensive. Second, there is now a much greater insistence on standards of safety and health in the manufacturing process and – for marketing purposes – bottling and labelling requirements.
Over time, less than enough has been done by government and the lending agencies to support, particularly, the micro enterprises in the sector so that many of them fell away while most of those that remained persisted at a more or less subsistence level.
There appears to have been something of a resurgence of agro-processing in Guyana in recent years. Not that the practice had ever disappeared completely but a significant number of new agro processing enterprises have sprung up across the country to the extent where the industry – excluding the major manufacturers in the local sugar and rum sectors – is reportedly worth in excess of $300 million.
The sector, however, is not without its significant problems not least of which is the high cost of electricity. In fact, it is no secret that the primary stumbling block to the growth of the sector locally is the fact that high electricity costs as a percentage of overall production costs mean that we cannot hope to compete with many other countries on the international market.
And even assuming that we were able to compete, health and sanitation-related non-tariff barriers and product presentation deficiencies still mean that, for the most part, our products do not command the kind of attention that they may well deserve on the international market.
Interest in the sector has now grown sufficiently to result in the creation of a local Agro Products Association and the Guyana Marketing Corporation, through its Guyana Shop, provides space for the display and sale of some of the products. Those developments apart there is the potential for further growth in the agro-processing sector afforded by the recent emergence of the Small Business Bureau and the support which it promises to give to the agricultural and agro-processing sectors.
Still, there remains an absence of what the Head of the Guyana Agro Processors Association Ram Prashad described as a “synergised” approach to the sector, that is to say that the various stakeholders viz the farmers, the manufacturers, the government, and the goods and service providers in the marketing, bottling and labelling sub-sectors are still not working together. Mr Prashad says that his most important hoped-for outcomes for today’s event is that it will result in a higher level of cohesion amongst the players in the sector and that that cohesion will help to grow the sector at a much greater rate than has been the case over the years. One particularly interesting idea proffered by Mr Prashad which he is expected to repeat today is the idea of creation a local agro-processing incubator—a one-stop facility equipped with all the essential amenities—where small agro-processors can, for a fee, produce, bottle and label their guava jam, achar or peanut butter and move the product from factory to market in one near seamless movement.
While, therefore, we must hope that today’s event provides value for effort and for money, that hope stands a chance of being realized only if the initiative is structured to be more of a results-oriented exercise than yet another exhibition/display which, these days, only serves to remind us of our still far from realized agro-processing potential.
