Two stories published in this issue of the Stabroek Business address the issue of buying local, albeit from different perspectives. The first one has to do with a local manufacturer who is seeking to secure a local market share for his products. During his interview with Stabroek Business the businessman was doing his best to persuade the public that his product, which faces formidable competition from other brands on the local market, was of a high standard. We will return to the issue of brands, competition and buying local presently.
The second is an off-the-cuff comment made to journalists a week ago, by Minister of Agriculture Dr Leslie Ramsammy about the virtues of supporting your own and some of the initiatives which he said the government was undertaking to ensure that more local products are available from which we can choose.
As Minister Ramsammy himself has conceded ‘buy local’ is nothing new though it has to be said that the earlier official urging that Guyanese alter their consumption patterns coincided with a particular set of economic circumstances and a period (during the 1970s) when the absence of foreign imports meant that buying local was more a matter of compulsion than of conviction.
These days, ‘buy local’ is a much more difficult concept to sell; not only here in Guyana but also in the rest of the region where the food import bill hovers around US$4 billion.
To return Guyana to ‘buy local’ advocates must combat consumption patterns which, these days, are influenced by powerful multimedia advertising, significantly increased travel, (many Guyanese now do much of their routine shopping by internet or otherwise in North America) local supermarkets stocked with imported items of all descriptions and open borders and official ports through which imported goods pass without hindrance.
As much we may wish to delude ourselves, therefore, ‘buy local’ is a much more difficult hurdle to cross today.
For all sorts of reasons, you have to wonder whether the local proclivity for foreign tastes is not our fault. For all the Minister of Agriculture’s seeming optimism that people will eventually come to appreciate the value of locally produced goods, neither government nor the mainstream private sector have ever come even close to mounting a ‘buy local’ marketing campaign that goes beyond ‘food fair’ fare. With mostly pepper sauce, achar and ground seasoning on offer, while such an event will always attract handfuls of the faithful, many people will simply persist in their customary Kellogg’s comfort zone.
Put differently, we have to stop paying lip service to ‘buy local’ by undertaking what are probably well-intentioned gestures that get nowhere.
The vast majority of the local manufacturing initiatives – primarily in the food, craft and ornament sectors have been undertaken at a small, often even micro level, with minimal financial investment so that there is never really enough resources left for major marketing of those products. That leaves those small manufacturers almost wholly dependent on the efforts of the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC), which, given its own limited resources, must limit itself to the kind of collective marketing that does not always lend itself to the effective promotion of particular products.
We have known for some time now that the absence of adequate infrastructure has been at least partially responsible for the failure of some of our local products to secure a measure of market access. Therefore, the question has to be asked as to why the current Medium and Small Enterprise Project being financed out of GRIF funds does not – at least so it appears – pay sufficient attention to structured marketing. Assuming that the project is successful and several of our medium and small sized enterprises do well the question will still arise as to where to find the local market for all of the various brands of the same seasonings, condiments and pickles. Again the GMC and its expanded Guyana Shop, even with the best will in the world, is a strictly limited marketing mechanism that simply cannot meet the needs of a continually expanding manufacturing sector without itself being significantly additionally resourced.
Not nearly enough has been done by either the government or the private sector to expand the range of products-particularly in the manufacturing sector-–produced for the local market. In that respect not only has the sector been standing virtually still but there has been no major move by the government, particularly, to invest in the science and research of agro processing; at least as far as we know.
Minister Ramsammy may in some instances be entirely correct about the higher quality of local products as against imported ones. Truth is, however, in circumstances where customer appeal is driven overwhelming by presentation, in this case, packaging and labelling, that is much more of a feel good argument than a workable marketing ploy.
If we accept that buying local is the best way to position ourselves to channel more resources into more worthwhile projects, then that is surely an argument for more state resources being allocated to creating an environment better suited to nurturing a more positive consumer disposition to local products. Surely we have long arrived at a point where a serious indigenous industries portfolio, with responsibility for all of the various facets of local product development should be created. We need to move away from the prevailing situation in which different high officials make different pronouncements at different times but where little that gets said serves to create an enhanced ‘buy local’ consumer culture.