Keen to accelerate the push to expand Guyana’s agro processing and craft sectors into the rest of the region and beyond, the organisers of the country’s UncappeD event is seeking to stage the next event of its kind in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member state of Antigua, Event Director Ramsay Ali told Stabroek Business in an exclusive interview on Sunday.
Planning for the first ever staging of the event outside Guyana, Ali told the Stabroek Business, will have to be preceded by exchanges between the authorities here in Georgetown and in St. John’s, the Antiguan capital, adding that the decision to seek to stage the next UncappeD event outside Guyana represents an attempt by the organisers to seek to provide an expanded external market for locally manufactured agro produce elsewhere in the region.
The disclosure by Ali comes against the backdrop of persistent, but less than successful previous attempts by the Government of Guyana to secure an expanded market for local agro produce elsewhere in the Caribbean. Agro processors have repeatedly told this newspaper that previous state organised initiatives to create a wider market in the region for local agro-produce have foundered largely on account of the limited role that the government is inclined to play in helping to create those breakthroughs. The primary problem here, some agro processors have said, has been the strictly limited contributions that government has been prepared to make to what are, in effect, attempts to establish Guyanese brands in external markets.
Ali told Stabroek Business that he believed that one way of achieving that goal is first, for local agro processors to secure a level of official support that will further lift the quality of the country’s agro processed goods to a level that allows these to find even greater market acceptance both inside and outside the region. Contextually, he alluded to the lack of progress, up until now, arising out of discourses designed to persuade the Government of Guyana to invest in one (or more) modern production facilities that would help local manufacturers, not just to ensure that the quality requirements of products are met, but also better position manufacturers to produce greater quantities of product to meet local as well as external market demands. Access to technology that can raise the standard of packaging and labelling in the sector is another of the issues with which the sector has struggled.
Ali also posited that government can, at this early stage, increase both material and logistical support for local agro processors and other players in the creative industries seeking to attend regional and international events through which they seek to grow their markets.
