For the better part of the year, so far, Jacklow, Pomeroon farmer, Oscar Richmond, has been watching a ‘new normal’ unfold before him. The accustomed routines associated with ‘doing business’ have either changed dramatically or vanished altogether and while his greatest wish is for a sense of normalcy to return, Oscar would appear to have come to terms with the reality that some of the changes may be permanent.
Farming, he explains, has about it an underpinning of predictability. You sow, you reap, and you market, and then you repeat the process. Intertwined with that regimen are the structures that hold the process together… like bargaining with the middleman over prices and dealing with what are often the complicated logistics of moving produce over long distances, to market. Your entire life is built around the predictabilities that attend those processes and when those are disturbed by unexpected interventions over which you have little if any control and particularly if the interventions persist, the process can become fraught with uncertainties. The weakening of procedures that have long held the ‘system’ together can be frightening. If these sustain themselves you can eventually reach a point where you are in a fight for your livelihood.
How close to that point the COVID-19 pandemic has brought Oscar is probably not yet clear.
What is certainly clear, however, is that he is in the throes of a ‘new normal’. The problem with COVID-19, he suggests, is that it is not one of those run-of-the-mill agriculture-related problems that surfaces, persists for a while then disappears, either in the fullness of time or on account of having expert interventions thrown at them. The COVID-19 upheaval is different. The entire country is involved in a game-changing fight to push back COVID-19 and everything has changed, or at least so it seems. The significant adjustments to the ferry service are among a menu of measures put in place to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Simultaneously, the new arrangement wreaks its own havoc, completely upending the movement of produce from farm to market… and inflicting a great deal of knock-on damage in the process.
A reduced transportation routine means that less volumes of food can be moved and the vehicles that carry the goods by road lapse reluctantly into interludes of unreliability and ‘jacked up’ costs. Eventually, the entire system settles into an inevitable meltdown that can manifest itself in disaster… like huge piles of farm produce rotting on the ground. That is what Oscar says, obtains at this time.
Oscar’s wife, Michelle, is the other half of the farming duo. She has, over time, built up a fairly impressive range of agro-produce – casareep, cassava bread, coconut water, plantain chips, porridge mix, and dried carambola, much of which is marketed through the Guyana Marketing Corporation’s Guyana Shop. That side of their enterprise too has slowed to a crawl. The Guyana Shop along with the Guyana School of Agriculture and occasional Farmers’ Markets used to be among Michelle’s biggest outlets. These days, those outlets have drifted into the realm of significantly reduced effectiveness or (as in the instance of the Farmers’ Markets), vanished entirely.
While we were interviewing Mr. Richmond by telephone he confided that he was looking at several bunches of plantains lying idly on the farm… rotting. Logistical challenges mean that for the time being, the demand that had required Michelle to use 500 pounds of plantains every month to manufacture plantain chips has disappeared. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. His tone compelled you to believe him.
Their bankers, Richmond says, have given him a grace period for the repayment of a loan. From time to time they will call to find out and encourage him not to give up which he finds a ‘touching and caring attitude’. He makes the rare case for commercial bankers caring about the well-being of small businesses.
He finds ‘the politics’ distracting, unsettling. It feels as though the country has been put ‘on hold.’ In circumstances where the farmers (and other businesses) find themselves there is need for a measure of certainty, going forward. He does not feel that that exists at this time.
Then he drifts from one to another of the day to day consequences of the completely altered circumstances… like his 150 carambola trees that are shedding their fruit like a brisk drizzle. The logistics associated with gathering the fruit and moving them to market have disappeared… so they drop and rot. A buyer at Number Two Canal had agreed to purchase the fruit from him at the significantly knocked-down price of $35 per pound. He has not heard from the buyer for some months and is considering the arrangement as having fallen through.
Then there is avocado, a fruit that is highly valued – globally. There is a considerable glut at this time and the challenges associated with moving them to market doesn’t make things any better. He sells some, eats some, and leaves the rest that fall to the animals. What he manages to sell is usually disposed of at significantly ‘knocked down’ prices.
A doleful expression fills his countenance when he talks about having had to let his farmhand ‘go’. Jobs of this nature mean a lot to the unemployed at Jacklow. The demanding tasks of reaping fruit and cleaning the farm are now left to himself and Michelle.
Richmond wants the ferry service between Parika and Supenaam restored to thrice daily in order to ‘loosen up’ the movement of farm produce to markets. That is one of those six-of-one-and-half-dozen-of-the-other issues that have to do with, among other things, pushing back the spread of the COVID-19. That is not, at this juncture, the farmers’ ‘call’. Michelle’s once thriving agro-processing enterprise is hanging in the balance.
Then he comes to the coconuts. The options there are now threefold. They remain hanging from the trees, permanent fixtures; they fall to the ground and remain there or sometimes he picks and his family drinks. There has to be something to break the monotony. It isn’t worth the while to think of coconuts in terms of the market. You used to be able to demand a pre-COVID-19 price of $60 each for coconuts. These days you cannot even recoup the price you pay for getting a picker to retrieve them from the trees. For a while, after the health benefits of citrus fruit had been ‘talked up’ in the wake of the advent of COVID-19, there was money to be made there. You could get somewhere in the region of up to $8,000 for a hundred oranges. The citrus range, however, is now ‘out of season.’
As far as the future is concerned, Oscar says that he has no place else to go. Immediately after leaving Charity Secondary school he returned there to teach Technical Drawing. The salary quickly saw him drift into mining. He “made some money,” quit and began to trade in farm produce between the Essequibo Coast and Bourda Market. Once, he had made a ‘trip to the Caribbean’ to “make some money.” Meeting his wife eventually anchored him to Jacklow.
That is the course on which his life is now set so that, for better or worse, there are few options available to Oscar Richmond beyond ‘waiting out’ the coronavirus. The uncertainty that has to do with the wait and the unpredictability of the ‘new normal’ are revealed in the farmer’s tone.
