A recent visit to the ‘spread’ of a fruit farmer in Berbice revealed a phenomenon that is almost certain to shock those of us whose day-to-day experiences do not bring us into contact with the general environment associated with fruit farming.
There are farmers who maintain significant acreages of fruit farm, boasting huge quantities of tropical fruit. It is the most amazing thing for those of us unaccustomed to the sight to watch flocks of birds gorge themselves on the flesh of ripening fruit, burdening the weary limbs from which they hang, or else having to pick your way amongst those fruit that have detached themselves from the branches and lie, fast diminishing in their quality, waiting to be recovered and eaten, or else doomed to rot and disappear as though they had never existed in the first place.
When we probed the phenomenon of the rotting fruit with the owner of the ‘spread’, we were told a story that would have been hilarious had it not been so shocking. Upon inquiring about the flock of birds that had descended on several lush and laden mango trees, and afterwards, a carpet of cherries that were being crushed underfoot with more on the trees, bloated with juice and seemingly impatient to detach themselves from their perches, the farmer responded with an air of indifference that our inquiry amounted to “another story.” That ‘other’ story was that while there was market for the huge volumes of wasting fruit, the prevailing price when set against of the cost of proper recovery of the fruit from the trees, meant that the best option at that particular point in time was to let the birds have their way.
It is no secret, of course, that survival and growth of the local wildlife population has to do largely with the opportunities that exist for them to be able to fill their stomachs with the generous bounty of fruit that go un-harvested and which, rightly, ought to be diverted (at least most of it) to undernourished humans of whom there are many in Guyana.
For those of us who do not understand the phenomenon, what the farmer told us tended not to make a great deal of sense until you come to the realisation that the particular Berbice neighbourhood comprised large plots of land comprising more-or-less the same fruit trees. We learnt that in the circumstances it was not the farmers who controlled the prices, but the middlemen who would turn up with their empty trucks and their basic understanding of the laws of supply and demand, who were ‘running things.’ A point had been reached, our Berbice farmer explained, where, the one-sided bargaining process over, the middlemen would agree to find their own pickers and would essentially acquire the fruit for – as we in Guyana say- ‘next to nothing.’
Interestingly, the United Nations is marking 2021 as the International Year of Fruit and Vegetables, a fact which, one expects, will be reflected in various ways, on Guyana’s own national agriculture agenda. What the UN seeks to do, it says, is to highlight the vital role that fruits and vegetables play in human nutrition and food security. The year will also focus, so the UN says, on the pursuit of efforts to enhance the sustainable production of fruit and vegetables, a pursuit linked to the personal admonition by UN Secretary Antonio Guterres that the tremendous benefits of fruits and vegetables notwithstanding, “we do not consume enough of them.”
No discussion of fruit and vegetables in Guyana can take place outside the framework of the country’s historic failure to pay anywhere near sufficient attention to maximising the opportunities afforded by our bountiful agricultural produce. In the instance of our not infrequent glut and attendant waste of huge volumes of both fruit and vegetables, little account has been taken of our historic failure to establish a strong linkage between fruit production and the creation of a strong agro-processing infrastructure linked to both local consumption and export markets that can stem the tide of wastage.
Such limited efforts as have been taken by government over the years have fallen woefully short of creating a strong nexus between the abundance of local fruit and vegetables and the optimisation of the benefits that can be derived therefrom through the creation of a supporting environment including resilient facilities for the processing of fruit and vegetables that are not directly absorbed by local consumer demand and which can then target both the local and export markets in the form of agro-produce.
Over time, the efforts of the Guyana Marketing Corporation, for example, noteworthy though these have been, have been inadequate to optimise the promotion of our fruit and vegetable bounty whilst, for all the bluster, we have, as a country, failed to effectively ‘sell’ to the global market the Guyana ‘brand’ where fruit and vegetables, of either the fresh or processed variety, is concerned.
It would, of course, be unfair to say that globally, Guyana stands alone amongst those countries that have failed to optimise the benefit of their fruit and vegetable bounty. An estimated 50% of fruits and vegetables produced in developing countries is lost in the supply chain between harvest and consumption. This, when measured against the fact that it can take up to 50 litres of water to produce a single orange, for example, is unacceptable. The fact of the matter is that fruit and vegetable losses represent a waste of increasingly scarce resources such as soil and water.
With the first month of the International Year of Fruits and Vegetables already past its halfway point, there is no reason why a collaborative effort involving the Ministries of Agriculture and Health and their respective support agencies ought not to have, by now, rolled out a manageable plan for its observance. Such a plan ought to have been focused not just on increasing the volumes of yield but also the quality of the fruit and vegetables that we produce and how these can be integrated into the food chain, not just in their fresh state but in their various value-added forms. A strategic plan in this regard should also focus on targeting regional and extra-regional markets for both fresh and processed fruit and vegetables, accomplishments which, it should be made clear, cannot be met by meetings and subsequent vacuous declarations.
Nor does justifiable excuse repose in responses that point to the national preoccupation with tackling the COVID-19 challenge since the UN itself cites a clear nexus between combatting the pandemic and the shoring up of our health-related defences through healthier eating.
In the instance of the local fruit waste situation referred to at the start of this editorial, government could have, over the years, done much worse than support meaningful investment in value-added facilities that can capture and preserve what, these days, amounts to bird food, and help to find markets for these value-added products outside of Guyana where the available intelligence tells us that there is an expanding market for high-quality, well-presented agro-produce. In this regard it would not be unfair to say that the state machinery, over the years, has been guilty of equal measures of ineptitude and laziness.
The issue that arises here is whether all of this will not become absorbed into a huge blotter of indifference or else, subsumed into some vacuous justification for shifting into an entirely different direction.
