Business Editorial

Even as the respective countries in the Caribbean continue to take their own separate tilts at bemoaning what they regard as the distressing state in which much of the region’s agricultural sector finds itself, there still appears to be no discernable region-wide move to respond to what is regarded as a looming crisis.

The blanket of uncertainty that continues to hover over occasional interventions that seek to reassure that there is some reasonable time frame to the lifespan of the coronavirus pandemic is beginning to occupy more room in the psyche of the international community.

It is not the Stabroek Business’ impression that the recent engagement between President Irfaan Ali and representatives of the private sector would have taken full account of the particular concerns of micro and small businesses even though this does not necessarily suggest that there is not, somewhere in the pipeline, some plan that will unfold, sooner rather than later, for the President to engage, eyeball to eyeball (figuratively speaking, of course) with some representative group from the thousands of small businesses across the country, many if not most of which share common problems that require common solutions.

There are several challenges, both short and longer term that accrue to the agriculture sector in the wake of the floods that are still affecting significant areas of the country at this time.

The twin factors of climate change and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on labour loss and its implications for the agricultural sector are among the primary factors that now bring the issue of food security in the Caribbean into ever sharper focus.

Last Tuesday’s media release issued by the Guyana Manufacturers’ & Services Associaion (GMSA) on the subject of the proliferation of illegal “food, drugs and cosmetics” into Guyana goes to the heart of a considerable challenge which the country has had to face over many years.

A cursory glance at the Stabroek Business’ editorial focus over the past year or so will reveal that much of our reporting has targeted the issue of the fate of small and micro businesses in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even as early as a few weeks ago it seemed likely that the floods which, official reports suggest, have now reached proportions of a crisis sufficiently severe as to warrant an appeal for international help, could escalate beyond the control of the country’s fragile response capabilities.

Now in its fifth year of ‘operation,’ following the passage in the National Assembly of the Food Safety Bill of 2016, not a great deal has been publicly disseminated about the work of the National Food Safety Authority (NFSA) nor has the agency benefitted from the kind of reporting that draws pointed attention to those undertakings in which it engages and the outcomes thereof.

Just a few weeks ago a farming   cooperative in the Mocha/Arcadia community executed two Farmers’ Markets over a relatively short period.

In the course of the recent engagement between Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha and Canada’s High Commissioner to Guyana Mark Berman during which – as reported in this issue of the Stabroek Business – the two talked up possibilities for the strengthening of relations between the two countries, Minister Mustapha, who is the serving Chairman of the Ministerial Task Force for advancing the agriculture agenda of the region, reportedly alluded to the current focus of the Task Force on producing a document on food security highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each member state, for submission to CARICOM Heads.

This is not the first occasion on which the Stabroek Business has made a pointed editorial comment on Guyana’s failure, up until now, to take any sort of initiative to speak of, to mark the United Nations-designated International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV).

Not many moons ago a pronouncement by a high official of government seeking to ‘sell’ Guyana’s preparedness to pay serious attention to expressions of interest by potential overseas investors would have been likely to encounter a healthy measure of skepticism.

One of our stories in this week’s edition of the Stabroek Business concerns the unfolding progress of the already considerably successful Jamaica Producers’ Group, (JPG) which, based on the contents of its performance profile, would appear to be among the ‘high fliers’ in the country’s agricultural sector and agro-processing sectors.

So far have we travelled from the condition of national euphoria that attended the May 2015 announcement by ExxonMobil that the Liza-1 oil well in the Stabroek block had yielded the first ‘world class’ oil find offshore Guyana, that last Tuesday’s revelation by the same company that it had had made the country’s nineteenth major oil find barely provoked a murmur from the country as a whole. 

Not even the current COVID-19 global emergency to which there, as yet, appears to be no end in sight could distract United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres from sounding what, in diplomatic terms, was a resounding alarm in response to the just released World Meteorolo-gical Organization (WMO) State of the Global Climate Report.

An article which we propose to publish in the Stabroek Business shortly undertakes a cursory examination of the experiences of a handful of ‘new entrepreneurs’ who have sought to either pursue optional ways of earning a living given the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the conventional labour market, or else, have decided to embark on new business excursions, presumably to add to their existing incomes or else, just ‘for the heck’ of undertaking a new adventure.

While this is not the first time that relatively young persons have been elected to lead the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI), one senses, this time around, an infusion of collective enlightenment amongst the relatively young team that has been chosen to head the Chamber in the period ahead.

Under the previous political administration, two Ministers of Government, first, the then Finance Minister Winston Jordan and afterwards, Dominic Gaskin in his capacity as Minister of Business, made public what they said was government’s intention to usher in the full and effective implementation of the provision in the 2004 Small Business Act to allow for small businesses to access 20 per cent of state contracts in circumstances where the effective completion of those contracts lay within the scope of their competence.

If we appear persistent in our call for the government to prepare, publish, and implement a countrywide programme of activities to mark International Year of Fruits and Vegetables (IYFV), so designated by the United Nations since December last year, that is because we see possibilities not just for Guyana’s participation in a global event that can boost the morale of the large numbers of local farmers during a period of trials and frustrations, but also because we can use IYFV as an important base on which to further consolidate an agricultural sector that is of significance to building a food-secure regime both here in Guyana and in the wider Caribbean.