While some small scale business owners in the agro processing sector still appear to hold the view that the Guyana Marketing Corporation (GMC) has an important role to play in the helping their businesses to grow and particularly to secure more markets both within and outside the region, they insist that the state-run entity can only realize these objectives if it is removed from within the operating framework of the Ministry of Agriculture and allowed to function outside the framework of the conventional state sector.
Responding to questions put to them during exchanges on possible approaches to rendering the GMC more relevant to the needs of agro processors and other categories of small manufacturers seeking to grow their businesses both at home and abroad, the twenty two small business owners interviewed by this newspaper over the past four weeks all told the Stabroek Business that they believed that the GMC should be granted a forum of semi-autonomy that removes it from under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture since they believed that the strictures arising out of being part of a conventional state entity inhibited its ability to serve the interests of private sector-oriented small businesses that were keen to grow into enterprises possessing both domestic and international profiles.
One private sector business owner with whom the Stabroek Business spoke said that the problem with the existing relationship is that while small businesses in the Agro Processing sector are primarily concerned with “product improvement and overseas markets,” the Ministry of Agriculture’s main focus is on using Agro Processors to enhance its own image rather than seriously pushing the hundreds of small businesses within the sector. “Sometimes it does not seem as though the GMC can make any really significant moves without the ‘say so’ of the Ministry,” the business owner told the Stabroek Business. Several weeks ago, the Stabroek Business posed a number of questions pertaining to the role of the GMC in local, regional and international growth of the country’s agro processing sector only to be confronted with the near unanimous view that the entity, in its current form, almost certainly lacks the competencies to help the agro processing sector transform itself by enhancing its product quality and local, regional and international marketing pursuits, necessary for their promotion. These deficiencies, they believe, are reposed in the fact the Ministry of Agriculture, as a conventional state entity, is unable to (in the words of one of the Agro Processors interviewed by this newspaper) “take the Agro-processing sector where it needs to go.”
A source within the Ministry of Agriculture told this newspaper bluntly that the GMC “dances strictly to the Ministry of Agriculture’s tune.” The source pointed to the fact that while the recent reported establishment of Agro Processing facilities across parts of the country have been promoted as “GMC projects” they are “strictly under the actual control” of the Ministry. All of the official promotional comments made in respect of the Agro Processing Facilities have emanated from the Minister/Ministry of Agriculture though it remains unclear whether all (or even most) of the facilities are currently up and fully functioning. High on the list of the concerns of the Agro Processors with whom the Stabroek Business spoke is what they say is the inability of the GMC to help Agro Processors secure a significant foothold for their products on the international market. They point out that while the GMC is usually involved in some logistical operations linked to participation in domestic, regional and international product promotion and marketing events, its role in these events is limited almost entirely to providing logistical support for facilitating the movement of products to the various sites and serving as an “official presence” at Product Promotion Boots.
“As the name suggests we would want a GMC that can be actively involved in helping to find markets in the Caribbean and the bigger markets in the USA and the UK for our products. There is no evidence that where international product promotion is concerned the GMC offers any serious practical support,” the representative of a prominent local brand told this newspaper. Representatives of several local Agro Processing entities that have been involved in regional and international product-promotion events have repeatedly told this newspaper that if the GMC is to really support the growth of the country’s Agro Processing sector it has to be removed from the conventional Public Service framework (while remaining a state-owned entity) and afforded “the tools and the authority” to function “locally, regionally and internationally” on a full-time basis “to help find markets and provide other services that can help local agro processors grow.”
Not for the first time local Agro Processors have drawn a parallel between the GMC and the Jamaica Products Corporation (JAMPRO), a statutory body which, while administratively falling under the country’s Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce has been granted considerable operating ‘freedom’ to promote business opportunities in export, marketing and investment opportunities for the country’s private sector. By contrast, one of the contributors to the discourse with the Stabroek Business said that the GMC continues to be “burdened by commitments” given by the Ministry of Agriculture on its behalf which, over time, have not been fulfilled, a circumstance that has negatively affected the public image of the state agency. Assessments of the challenges facing the GMC have blamed some of the entity’s underperformance challenges on the fact that it continues to be ‘imprisoned’ within the country’s Ministry of Agriculture and must therefore dance to a tune composed by a watchdog institution that is concerned much more with burnishing its own image than with enhancing the effectiveness of the GMC.
Back in February 2022 a Ministry of Agriculture report (News Agency February 21, 2022,) asserted that farmers and agro processors would benefit from “lucrative markets” in that year under what it said would be a “more proactive approach” that would “ensure farmers, agro-processors and exporters are linked to the most lucrative markets, locally, regionally and internationally.” The undertaking, according to the report, would have seen the GMC “developing strategies through extensive market research this year (2023) to promote Guyana’s agricultural products here, across the region and internationally.” Additionally, the report had stated that an amount of G$340 million had been allocated “to fast track the initiative through the participation of trade fairs and exhibition, and the use of e-marketing/e-commerce platforms. Nothing has been heard of these undertakings since then.
Last year the GMC was again thrown into the national spotlight when an April 18 pronouncement by Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha disclosed that “farmers across the country (News Room, April 18 2023) were set to benefit from the use of thirteen agro processing facilities which the report asserted would have been “completed by the end of 2023.” Up to this time there has been no information forthcoming from the Ministry of Agriculture regarding the completion or otherwise of the facilities, though, in two instances, this newspaper’s interviewees were adamant that some of the facilities were “not even close to being up and running.” Some of the persons interviewed by this newspaper have recommended that government, “at the highest level” (according to one contributor) should re-examine the relationship between the Ministry of Agriculture and the GMC in order to determine whether the latter can successfully serve its substantive purpose while it remains under the strict and unrelenting control of a government ministry whose concern, overwhelmingly, is with its political agenda.
