Latest update December 2nd, 2024 1:00 AM
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Local $50B cash crop industry taking on formal setting
Guyana’s $50B cash crop sector is growing with farmers trying to organize their activities into a formal setting like the sugar industry.
This is according to Dr. Leslie Ramsammy, Minister of Agriculture, who said that local farmers are moving away from producing crops at a subsistence level. 
With increasing vegetable and fruits production, locally, the emphasis now is to ensure that some of the produce enters the processed food industry. Currently, most of the produce is consumed locally. There is a small overseas market for fresh crops such as pumpkin, squash and pineapple.
One of the challenges faced with exporting fresh crops is transportation. “You can’t send them with ships because they are perishables. You need the expensive air freight and that creates a problem for us because the cost would not be competitive,” Dr. Ramsammy said.
As such, there is a great need to find ways to process foods. Guyana’s agro-processing industry has grown to about US$2B worth of products. However, there are still challenges in the areas of packaging and labeling, he said.
“You can’t export pepper sauce and plantain chips and all these things unless you meet the sanitary and phytosanitary standards and traceability etc…. For this reason the Ministry of Agriculture this year will be hiring two specialists,” he said.
According to the Minister, one of the specialists would be a food scientist tasked with explaining to agro-processors how to conduct their business in the manner that meets the requirements of the European, American and Caribbean markets.
The other specialist would be responsible for teaching agro-processors how to qualify for both the food and drug registration locally and the ISO certification.
Dr. Ramsammy said that this is an investment for the agriculture sector and the agro-processing sector since hiring technical experts for a factory would be quite costly. Therefore, the specialists hired will serve everybody.
Dr. Ramsammy said that there is great potential for processed foods locally whilst emphasizing that Guyana imports $200M of frozen potatoes to make potato chips. He noted that Guyana could start packaging cassava as a frozen product to export, as one entity in Guyana is already doing.
The Minister said that because of the new global order imposed by the World Trade Organization Guyana cannot ban foreign products from entering the local market. For instance, Guyana imports pepper sauce while pepper sauce is produced locally.
“So whilst we don’t ban we need to create a demand for local products that cause low importation. That is one of the strategies we are using with one of our farmers now. We are creating not subsistence livelihood for them but a wealth generating business,” Dr. Ramsammy said.
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