For the vast majority of small business owners who turned up at the recent UncappeD event at the Providence Stadium two weekends ago, the event served as a timely release valve for one of the sectors of the Guyana economy that had suffered most under the punishing regime of the coronavirus pandemic which appears, for the time being at least, to have subsided somewhat.
The Stabroek Business’ engagements with many of the stallholders who turned up at the stadium made no secret of the fact that they were there as part of what they explained were a succession of carefully planned initiatives designed to have them recover from what, in some instances, were the ravages of the pandemic.
The stories of their experiences during the difficult lockdown period varied. For those involved directly in agriculture it was a matter of protecting themselves, their families and in a handful of instances, their workers, from high levels of sustained exposure to a pandemic that was undiscriminating in the matter of where it turned up and who it afflicted. In a whole number of cases, concern over the likelihood of infection was sufficiently high to have the small-farm owners simply ‘down tools’ and retreat to the relative shelter of their homes. That meant the cessation of the flow of an income stream which, in many instances, left the victims with no options.
Setting aside the somewhat depressing aspects of our probe, however, our inquiries benefitted from a reassuring level of optimism, a determination by those who had ‘set up stalls’ at Providence to ‘ride out’ an interlude of ‘tough times’, the duration of which, they conceded cannot be determined at this time.
If there appeared to be a measure of comfort to be derived from what had appeared, over the previous few weeks, something of a reopening of the sectors to which they have long looked for their livelihoods, they all agreed that the time frame within which that would occur could hardly be predicted.
Prior to the UncappeD event, Stabroek Business had undertaken a ‘walk through’ of the operations of some of the same agro-processors who had set up stalls at the UncappeD event. What we found ranged from modest but impressive storage bonds crammed with product that had been ‘parked’ on account of the COVID-19-driven loss of demand to operations that had shut altogether, their proprietors looking glum, pondering their next moves.
Whether officialdom likes it or not, there exists a considerable body of opinion within the circle of businesses that attended the UncappeD event that while the pandemic was both unpredictable and unavoidable, an Act of God, as people are wont to put it, the condition of fragility and weakness in which the COVID-19 pandemic caught hundreds of businesses in the small scale farming and agro-processing sectors had much to do with the scale of the crisis visited upon them. From the recesses of their memories they excavated challenges like the historic failure of government to adequately cater to the growth of the small business sectors, not least agro-processing by being miserly with financing and failing, continually, to provide publicly promised infrastructure with which to consolidate the growth of the structure. High packaging and labelling standards, without which our manufactured products are unlikely to ‘see the light of day’ insofar as external markets are concerned, simply cannot be realised, across the board, without considerable help from the state. This has not been forthcoming nor has there been any real evidence of efforts by government to seek to point some of the would be investors that have come here in response to our oil bonanza to pay a measure of interest, even a modest one, in the growth of the agro-processing and other small business sub sectors.
With our assorted groups of small farmers, agro-processors, craftsmen and women, and beauty enhancement practitioners, among others, having already hitched their sales to the masts of business models in which they have already made considerable investments, a change in entrepreneurial direction is not an easy option. Their sails are already hitched to the mast of an economic model with which they are ‘comfortable’ and from which they are far from inclined to depart. What they appear to want, more than anything else, is the creation of space in the rush and crush of official preoccupation with establishing the building blocks of our much touted ‘oil and gas economy’ in which a more generous attention can be given to the creation of partnerships with government and the small business sectors upon which so many families depend for livelihoods and which can make their own meaningful contributions with both raising standards of living across the swathe of poor families across the country while, simultaneously, promoting Guyana abroad as something much more than an economy that has hitched its sails to the mast of an industry that has its limitations in terms of its being able to define us as a great country.
