This week’s announcement that the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) is collaborating with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) to help local agro-processors improve their competency in areas that are critical to the growth and development of their respective business ventures is good news and this newspaper’s first reaction to the announcement is that no effort should be spared to ensure that the optimum number of agro-processors, critically, from the farthest flung areas of the country as funding and logistics permit, secure an opportunity to benefit from the project.
Frankly, though, we cannot help but wonder – given what we know about the scale and sophistication of the agro-processing industry, whether the requirement that expressions of interest by the agro-processors be submitted “electronically by e-mail… in pdf format” is not likely to work to the disadvantage of those small agro-processors who might benefit from the training but who may simply not be technologically positioned to meet that particular requirement. In our view it may be a worthwhile idea to seek to draw the agro-processors’ attention to the training opportunity by collaborating with the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) which agency, in our opinion, understands agro-processors and the agro-processing industry better than most others in Guyana. This knowledge would have derived from the ongoing training, market opportunities and other forms of support which the GMC has made available to small and medium-sized operators including, crucially, the market outlet which it continues to provide through the Guyana Shop. Certainly, we believe that by pressing the GMC into service to help in the promotion of the programme and perhaps even involving the agency in some aspects of training delivery in areas such as Good Manufacturing Practices and packaging & labelling will, in the long run, help to ensure that its objectives are realised.
Agro-processors, of course, face challenges in developing their enterprises that go beyond those disciplines covered by the GCCI’s CDB-funded training exercise. It bears repeating that the training being offered through the CDB/GCCI initiative can go some way towards addressing some of the important challenges facing the sector. Challenges that have to do mostly with issues like financing of agro-processing ventures and expanding market share both at home (where little has been done up until now to roll back volumes of imported products in areas like condiments and snack foods) and other limitations that have to do with packaging & labelling (which is covered in the GCCI training programme) as well as manufacturing constraints – like an absence of adequate plant and machinery for use by small agro processors – that limit the volumes that can be produced for sale on the local market far less on the external market.
Conversations with some of the producers/vendors who returned from the recent Trade Fair event in Fort Lauderdale point to the fact that they have expanded their education on the sector in which they are involved and that they are now under far fewer illusions than in the past regarding the challenges that they face. In essence, events like the recent Fort Lauderdale Fair have been treated largely as learning experiences, albeit at considerable cost, though the fact that they are prepared to pay to learn would appear to augur well for the future.
One of the things which the GCCI programme seeks to do is to raise awareness of the importance of good manufacturing practices and packaging & labelling. Encouragingly, some of our small agro-processors have already begun to develop an appreciation of the competitive environment in which they operate and are investing amounts that they can ill-afford at this time in developing modest factories in an effort to satisfy requirements associated with good manufacturing standards. In the area of packaging & labelling there has been a virtual revolution of standards over a period of less than a decade as our local agro-processors come to terms with the critical nexus between product presentation and being competitive on both the local and international markets.
Perhaps the most important issue that has to be addressed with training/orientation of the nature contemplated in the CDB/GCCI initiative is what happens beyond the training. Are the objective conditions under which our agro-processors work conducive to them being able to effectively implement the knowledge that they will secure through the training programme? The reality is that “improving quality standards of agro-processors,” which is the underlying objective of the exercise can only be realised if the knowledge that is imparted is twinned to a set of objective operating conditions that allow the agro-processors to make optimum use of what they learn from the exercise. That, manifestly, in some instances, is likely not to be the case at this time. What is needed is for the training to be tied to what one might call complementary initiatives that allow for the openings provided by the training experience to be optimised. These complementary initiatives, should involve significantly stepped up public/private sector joint initiatives, not least far more funding for agro-processing undertakings that raise our quality bar and by extension open up significant market opportunities both at home and abroad.
We can determine whether or not the resources assigned to this initiative have been gainfully dispersed only when we arrive at a point when determinations that have to do with clear outcomes (of the training that is) can be definitively made.