At face value it may not sound like a great deal and, moreover, it is only one of a multitude of initiatives required to address the varied challenges facing the local craftspeople and artisans and their industries. What, however, is noteworthy about the announcement this week by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) that it will be collaborating with the Guyana Arts and Craft Producers Association (GACPA) and the Caribbean Technological Consultancy Services Network (CTCSN) to deliver a two-week workshop on mould design and manufacturing is that it goes directly to the very heart of a hurdle, which, try as it might, the local craft industry has, for decades, been unable to surmount.
Quite simply, the sector has failed, over a protracted period of time, to embrace modern techniques that would allow for a significant increase in production volumes. It is this weakness as much as any other that has caused local craftspeople to point accusing fingers at those countries – like China – that have employed their more technologically efficient production methods to flood other markets with craft and artefacts at prices with which countries like Guyana are unable to compete.
Nor has it been simply a matter of cheaper labour and raw materials. As the Terms of Reference for the workshop point out artisans have, over many years, failed to adopt to modern developments and innovations in mass production and, accordingly, they have been unable to meet the large and continually growing overseas markets that usually require large quantities of product at competitive prices.
Not infrequently, we hear repetitive and downright depressing stories about local craftspeople being unable to meet large overseas orders for their products or vendors attending events and having not a great deal to show—far less sell—beyond the display items on their stalls. Here at home potential customers make a considerable fuss about the cheaper Chinese imports much of which, even now, is being favoured over the pricier locally produced craft.
Part of the problem reposes in the fact that over the years and at the level of government, enough has simply not been done to organize the latent talents of our artisans and craftspeople and to build a robust infrastructure to support the industry. On the other hand the artisans and craftspeople themselves have not shown a great deal of ingenuity in taking collective initiatives to meaningfully grow the sector. In the case of the GACPA there has been evidence of a lack of cohesion at the organizational level that may well be responsible for the frustration that has been repeatedly been expressed to this newspaper about the state of the association and its failure to take its membership forward. More than that one gets the impression that it tends to demonstrate far too much dependence on official sponsorship in its various endeavours.
Perhaps more to the point, at the individual level, while there is no shortage of those creative skills that are linked to their respective traders, our artisans and craftspeople have not proven themselves, in many instances to be adept at adopting business strategies that take their enterprises forward.
The hoped-for end objective of the mould-design workshop is that it will transform the sector from one in which each product is made by hand then baked to hardness to one in which multiple products are manufactured in moulds. Up until now and despite the continuing development of mass-manufacturing techniques and synthetic materials, artisans have been painfully slow in adopting these innovations. As GCCI President Lance Hinds told this newspaper earlier this week “we have already been left far behind and we cannot afford to wait any longer to start playing catchup.”
The Chamber has made the point that its move to popularize the technology associated with mould-design and manufacturing comes at a time when both intra-regional and extra-regional export demand for ceramic and pottery products has increased in recent years – by 36 per cent between 2011 and 2012 and by 25 per cent between 2012 and 2013. Hinds’s argument that those figures are sufficiently encouraging to cause us to begin to “seriously look beyond the local market” are entirely valid though we must wait to see whether the CTCS Network workshop bears any meaningful fruit in the period beyond its execution.
