Each year that a Guyana contingent had flown off to sister CARICOM member country, Barbados, to participate in the island’s Agro Fest, an event designed to serve as a marketplace where ‘vendors’ from the Caribbean could display indigenous products in a space that attracted the attention of a single regional market, Guyanese Agro Processors and craftsmen and women embraced the event as one that provided an option for expanding from what has always been a limited domestic market.
Agro-fest, however, has always presented some specific challenges. The first was the challenge of meeting the cost of making the annual first quarter trip to the sister CARICOM member country to ‘catch’ the expanded market comprising not only indigenous (Barbadian) ‘vendors’ but others from across the region who saw the island’s Agro Fest as an international market for indigenous products that had never existed previously.
The possibilities appeared to be limitless; particularly for the enormous ‘army’ of local products whose long-established creative abilities (and access to a wide assortment of fruit and vegetables) had, over time, transformed their kitchens into ‘factories’ that turned out bewildering array of ‘manufactured’ agro produce. Once the creative craze associated with the agro processing industry had reached its limits, however, there was no place else to go.