The transformation in the fortunes of the cooperative movement in Guyana over the past four plus decades could hardly have been more dramatic. 1n the late 1970’s the then Prime Minister of Guyana, Forbes Burnham, had institutionalized policies and established institutions – the Guyana National Cooperative Bank being the standout example – aimed at placing the cooperative movement at the centre of the country’s development focus. The cooperative was to be a model for the development of ‘the small man,’ whose circumstances were to become transformed through collective entrepreneurial endeavour mostly though not exclusively in the field of agriculture.
These days, official discourse about the cooperative movement speaks mostly about its “revival,” the coded official language putting into perspective the government’s own verdict of the dire condition in which the movement finds itself.
In May this year, Minister of State Joseph Harmon told a gathering at the commissioning of a new Training Centre for the Essequibo/Pomeroon Regional Cooperative Union Limited (EPRCUL) at Anna Regina that the David Granger administration was committed to the restoration of the cooperative movement. Whether, however, up until now, any real evidence has emerged to validate Harmon’s pronouncement, is doubtful.
Late last year the administration announced that it was pumping some US$12 million into the establishment of four model cooperatives in Buxton, Beterverwagting, Mocha and Ithaca Village, though there has been little by way of progress reports on these projects as of late. More recently, the Minister responsible for cooperatives, Keith Scott reported that the administration had begun resuscitating cooperatives in Regions Two (Pomeroon-Supenaam); Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara); Four (Demerara-Mahaica); Five (Mahaica-Berbice); Six (East Berbice-Corentyne); and Ten (Upper Demerara-Upper Berbice).
For all this, attempts by this newspaper to secure a recent status report on the performance of cooperatives across the country through the office of the Chief Cooperatives Officer have met with no success. What has been suggested is that the near universal underperformance of the movement over several years has made such status reports a closely guarded secret. Few people appear to doubt that the local cooperative movement is yet to begin to climb out of the trough in which it has been stuck for many years.
The contemporary fortunes of the Friendship, East Bank Demerara-based Marfriends Cooperative Land Society Ltd. (its registered name is the Marfriends Agricultural Marketing Producers Cooperative Society Ltd) would appear to mirror the broader challenges confronting the wider cooperative movement. Officially registered in 1982 (though agricultural pursuits were being undertaken on the land more than a decade earlier) Marfriends started life with sixty farmers including several women. Each individual or household was allotted one hectare (approximately 2.4 acres) of land. The venture, it appears, held its own for a while though in 1989 such progress as was being made was intruded on by the Guyana Fisheries Ltd., claiming ownership of the land and requiring the farmers to remove therefrom. After all these years this matter continues to engage the attention of the courts.
Stabroek Business visited the Marfriends Cooperative on Saturday at the invitation of its Secretary, a hydroponic farmer named Fitzroy Valentine. He had visited Stabroek News’ Robb Street offices a few days earlier, to share an explanation and a pile of documents pertaining to the ‘history’ of the legal tussle between Marfriends and Fisheries over the land on which the Cooperative was farming.
The sixty-odd farmers comprising the Cooperative meet on two Sundays in every month to discuss common problems such as drainage and irrigation, new strategies for marketing their produce, maintenance of roads on the property and the resolution of the land dispute with Fisheries. That, it seems, is as far as the collective endeavour goes. Beyond their weekend discourses Marfriends comes across as a clutch of families and individuals sharing the same physical space but owning and operating separate farming ventures which appear to enjoy varying levels of success. While as a collective they each recognize that there is a common problem associated with the threat to the land which affords them a living, each venture is clearly more preoccupied with its own growth than with the sense of cooperative, the substantive purpose for their coming together in the first place.
Cooperatives, Valentine had told us during an earlier exchange, while retaining its relevance as an economic opportunity for working class individuals and families with little investment capital, have lost the attractiveness with which they were ‘anointed’ by Forbes Burnham, the country’s first Prime Minister. Evidence of this, he believes, is to be found not only in the alarming failure of cooperative societies even before the start of the new decade, but in the contemporary preference amongst modest investors for family enterprises over which they have greater control, so that the Cooperative, in many instances, has become a sort of mental comfort zone in which the largely unsuccessful adherents can experience a kind of collective validation even in their condition of underachievement.
At Marfriends we found unmistakable evidence of a seeming loss of focus as far as the actualization of the objectives of the cooperative is concerned. That, it seems, has been supplanted by a sense, among the members, that their economic lives are inextricably bound up with the venture, whatever it has turned out to be and that there is simply no other option to pursue.
At Marfriends, relations between and amongst the individuals and families who have, for years, occupied the same space, remain amicable. What they ought to have in common, however, appears to have vanished long ago.
At the one extreme is the fairly successful Blyden family venture ( separate story is published elsewhere in this issue), as well as Valentine’s hydroponic farming initiative with its marketing component supported by a Facebook outreach with customers and potential customers and a routine delivery-to-order arrangement for fresh vegetables.
And then there is the other extreme, symbolized by the two farmers whom we met at Marfriends who are at least frank enough to concede that, as things stand, they are ‘on a hiding to nowhere.’ Their discourse with Stabroek Business turned out to be an exercise in absorbing, yet deeply disturbing, honesty about their circumstances. What they concede is that the spirit of the cooperative no longer thrives at Marfriends; that their respective farming ventures are driven by no planning, so that they are unable to determine whether or not their enterprises are making a profit. They admit to needing help but in the absence of a culture of cooperativism at Marfriends and given the weakness of the state-driven cooperative support mechanism, they see no silver lining behind the prevailing dark cloud. Their persistence with what they do is a function of the absence of viable options.
Over the past forty years the members of Marfriends have invested sums totaling between $470 million and $685 million in their various economic ventures, according to the Society’s records. The returns on their investment up until now have been a handful of moderately successful farming ventures, an unsigned lease for the property on which it sits and a legal challenge from NICIL, even though it insists that the Certificate of Title being held by NICIL does not pertain to Block 27, Parcel 15, the area which Marfriends occupies. The unfinished legal journey which the Society’s ongoing land dispute has undertaken has become burdened with myriad twists and turns for which there is not enough space here.
What remains relevant, however, is the potential usefulness of Marfriends as a barometer with which to help assess the condition of the contemporary cooperative movement, to secure enlightened insights into its shortcomings and to design strategies aimed at correcting those shortcomings. Perhaps the more fundamental consideration has to do with whether the cooperative as an economic model still has a place in an economy that has become more deeply immersed in more conventional business models.
Fitzroy Valentine, at least, believes that for all its underachievement, the cooperative remains relevant as a mechanism of empowerment for ordinary Guyanese and remains, in Guyana’s circumstances, a powerful tool for what he calls ‘accomplishing together.” He goes further, asserting that the ultimate manifestation of the value of the cooperative in a Guyana poised to benefit from its oil resources reposes in the role it can play in enhancing its own prospects by providing local content-related goods and services – predominantly fresh fruit and vegetables – to expatriate companies involved in oil exploitation. That, he believes, could restore faith in a blueprint for economic activity which appears to have lost most of its earlier traction with Guyanese.
