It seems that every time this newspaper visits the Guyana Marketing Corporation’s Guyana Shop several new brands of locally produced agro-products are on display and available for sale to the public. Our understanding is that the Guyana Shop shares collaborative arrangements with shops across coastal Guyana so that shelves in those shops are dedicated to housing at least some of those products which in effect means that they are available to a wider market.
We understand, of course, that if our agro-producers are to meaningfully grow their businesses there needs to be a much greater effort to expand their markets way beyond what exists at this time and that there is a role, a major one, for government here.
The other point to be made about our agro-processors – mostly small businesses – before we go further is that most of their businesses would have grown out of experimental, frequently kitchen-based efforts and many of these would have ‘come through’ to where they are today by trial and error. If this is not to say that there have not been instances in which some have benefitted from institutional help of one kind or another, these adventurers in our agro-processing sector ought to be accorded the highest praise for where they are today.
It is not so much that government has been entirely indifferent to the need to help our agro-processors along the way (after all the Guyana Shop is a state institution and other state institutions like GO-Invest and the Small Business Bureau do play a modest part in supporting the agro-processing sector) though the reality is that government, over the years, has demonstrated insufficient skill and determination (as distinct from Jamaica, for example) to put in the effort and the investment first, to ensure that the supporting tools are available to help with the growth of these small enterprises in the first place and secondly to invest state funding in external marketing support initiatives designed to take the various brands across the world.
What also needs to be said at this juncture (for the benefit of the relevant state agencies) is that while periodic exhibitions provide opportunities for local consumers to keep abreast of the products as they come on the market, these are unlikely to ‘cut it’ as far as the greater effort to access the more meaningful external markets is concerned. Global marketing initiatives that seek to put our agro-produce on the map in a meaningful way have to be backed by significant financial investment as well as the creation of a far more robust institutional framework for overseas product promotion similar to those that have been employed by other CARICOM countries (Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Barbados are perfect examples) for decades. The fact of the matter is that in the matter of aggressively spearheading the promotion of our agro-products abroad, government has had no particularly good excuse for its failure to do so with any real enthusiasm over the years.
One might well ask whether our diplomatic missions, our most stable and grounded outposts are not ideally positioned to serve as ‘display shelves’ for product promotion. If this may sound like a demeaning undertaking to assign to the Government of Guyana’s respective diplomatic premises, the point should be made that tasteful displays of local products on diplomatic premises are not unheard of in foreign capitals. Perhaps the more salient point to be made here (and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs may even have made it recently) has to do with providing overseas missions with the relevant resources, both material and human, to support a level of product promotion in countries with major markets. Here, the reality is, that the full extent of the meaning of economic diplomacy, for those of us who are relatively initiated, will remain ill-explained unless we come to understand what direct role, if any, our diplomatic missions are intended to play in active and ongoing marketing initiatives in foreign markets (and there are distribution outlets in metropolitan outlets that are large enough to change the fortunes of many of our agro-processing businesses) and what, precisely, those roles may be.
Here, perhaps, there may be potential for collaborative arrangements between the Guyana Office for Investment (GO-Invest) and our diplomatic missions abroad that facilitate the placement of suitably qualified and motivated GO-Invest functionaries (here, the phrase suitably qualified and motivated cannot be overemphasized) to focus on product promotion. One might even find that additional help with product promotion may be available in the diaspora among Guyanese searching for a meaningful role in contributing to Guyana’s development.
We have ‘talked’ overseas product promotion over many decades without – as far as this newspaper recalls – even putting any real human and material resources into its actualization. Meanwhile, our mostly small, under-resourced agro-processors at home have, through sheer determination, done both themselves and Guyana proud by incrementally improving both the range and quality of our agro-products and at considerable cost and with only limited institutional support created product packages that measure up to what, these days, are excessively demanding standards. The Guyana Shop, in its own way, has done commendable work in the area of product promotion but the overall effort of government where seeking out markets and enhancing the fortunes of the sector is concerned has been nowhere near sufficient. In the matter of enhancing the fortunes of a potentially lucrative agro-processing sector, government has a great deal more stepping up to do.
