Seemingly keen to create a region-wide enthusiasm for an accelerated focus on agriculture and agro-processing as vehicles to provide support for the region’s now widely disseminated 25 x 2025 objective, Guyana is aiming to take its next UncappeD event to Antigua, Event Director of the considerably successful product display of agro-produce and senior Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) official, Ramsay Ali, has told the Stabroek Business.
The disclosure comes on the back of what is being seen as the highly successful April 30 and May 1 staging of the UncappeD at the Providence Stadium and what Ali told the Stabroek Business was an attempt to regionalise the pursuit of product promotion in line with the set deadline for reducing extra-regional food imports by 25% by 2025.
The announcement also comes on the back of impressive regional participation in the May Regional Agricultural Forum, at levels that included Caribbean Community Heads of Government.
What the UncappeD event and the subsequent state-organised 25 x 2022 forum did was to demonstrate a heightened state of readiness of the local agro-processing community to begin to make its way into the wider Caribbean, and Antigua, which has itself embarked on agro-processing undertakings that have caught the attention of other parts of the region, would be as good as any other territory in which to start.
Stabroek Business understands that planning for the first ever staging of the event outside Guyana has already commenced and that, going forward, exchanges between the relevant parties in Georgetown and in St. John’s will have to precede plans for the staging of the event in Antigua.
With local agro-processors now becoming increasingly exposed to travel and marketing opportunities in the region there is the expectation that if the requisite government support is forthcoming, the intended Antigua UncappeD event is likely to be well-supported by local agro-processors. A source familiar with aspects of consumer demand in Antigua has told the Stabroek Business that the staging of an UncappeD product display in Antigua is likely to meet with an enthusiastic response there. Stabroek Business has also been informed that one of Guyana’s leading manufacturers in the agro-processing sector operates a distribution facility in Antigua.
More aggressive intra-regional product promotion is likely to be a corollary to the 25 x 2025 mandate which the Caribbean has set itself and the Stabroek Business understands that arising out of the recent Barbados Agri Fest at least one Guyanese agro-processor has established a relationship with a contact in Antigua out of which has emerged an interest in a popular locally manufactured condiment.
While the recent surge of interest in regional product promotion has resulted in some positive spinoff for Guyana, another local agro-processor who participated in the Barbados event has told the Stabroek Business that if intra-regional entrepreneurial links designed to benefit the agro-processing links are to grow stronger, governments in the region, “particularly Guyana which is regarded as the regional leader here,” will have to step in to support the initiative to further popularise local agro-produce in the region. Shipping, the source told Stabroek Business, will be one of the most important factors that will determine the success or failure of the initiative.
The disclosure that the next UncappeD event will be staged in Antigua 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 expanded regional and extra-regional markets for local agro-produce have foundered largely on account of limited state support for such ventures. These experiences have given rise to a now-emerging lobby from export-driven businesses in the agro-processing and other sectors, for government to set aside a sufficiently adequate financial allocation to support overseas marketing-related travels by businesses in the agro-processing and craft sectors, particularly. The current retardation in overseas market access, some agro-processors have told this newspaper, has, up to this time, been largely a function of the absence of adequate state services for the maximising of market opportunities.
Ali himself has told the Stabroek Business that he believed that one way of transforming the fortunes of the agro-processing sector is for 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 affords them guaranteed acceptance on both local and international markets. Contextually, he alluded to the lack of progress, up until now, arising out of discourses designed to persuade the government 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 acknowledges.
The GMSA senior official 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.
