Up to this time we are yet to make a proper assessment of the extent of the impact which the Coronavirus has had on micro and small businesses in the farming and agro-processing sectors. Nor have we been able to determine just how long it will take for these enterprises to recover and, indeed, whether many of them will recover at all.
Part of this newspaper’s routine editorial pursuit at this time is to try to find many of those micro and small business enterprises in the aforementioned sectors as well as others in businesses that include, for example, enterprises in the beauty and apparel sectors and in the food industry. We are aware that a sizeable portion of the country’s micro and small enterprises operate in these sectors and that many of them had taken a decision to soldier on through the pandemic with little, or in many instances, no support save and except the backing of family members.
Here we particularly wish to single out the Mocha Arcadia Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society which includes a hardy breed of farmers and agro-processors who have been battling against odds that include the constant and protracted flooding of farmlands, a circumstance that continues to place restraints on the ability of the farmers -and by extension, the agro processors – to maximise their entrepreneurial pursuits. Beyond their efforts to make as good a living as they can out of their respective pursuits, the farmers and agro-processors in Mocha provide their community and other communities with an important service through one of the most popular Farmers’ Markets across coastal Guyana.
Except there is some urgent official intervention, last Sunday’s Market may well have been the requiem for an important community service. Having arrived in the community to cover the event, the Stabroek Business was greeted with the news that around fifty farmers, apparently tired of the uncertainties associated with the constant flooding of their farms and, they say, a lack of any real evidence up to this time of a serious intention of officialdom to remedy the drainage problem, have decided to call it a day.
Quite what the consequences will be, not just in terms of loss of income for the farmers, but also in terms of the likely disappearance of an important community service is unclear at this time. What is certain is that having only just begun to feel that they might be approaching some measure of light in the tunnel of a pandemic that had blighted their lives and restrained their economic progress for at least two years, the farmers associated with the Mocha Arcadia Multi-Purpose Cooperative Society may well be challenged to pick themselves up a second time.
The government, given the ambitious plans that it continues to make public for new dimensions of growth for the agricultural sector cannot but respond to what is, in effect, a crisis for the affected community by probing and moving to respond to the problems which the farmers face without delay.