Mitford Ward’s excursion into private enterprise had its roots in the realisation that the country’s high cost of living renders the returns from salaried employment altogether inadequate to meet one’s needs. “It became difficult to live comfortably on a salary,” he says.
Fortunately, this discovery that agro-processing was an option did not give rise to the necessity for him to reinvent the wheel. As a young man in his home village of Lightown on the East Bank of Berbice, during the early 1980’s, he had developed an interest in agro-processing. That interest, he says, coincided with the continual worsening of a crippling economic crisis in Guyana. In a sense, circumstance pushed him in the direction of his present entrepreneurial pursuit.
Mitford’s own venture into agro-processing was part of a wider pursuit of self-employment undertakings by individuals and families seeking subsidies to modest earned incomes. Access to land and what in the cases of many families, had been a background in farming, made agriculture one of the more popular options.