THE TWO WAVES OF BANNING OF FOOD ITEMS

Jun 21, 2014 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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I recently went into one of our local supermarkets. My assignment was to pick up a few pints of split peas to make some split peas cook-up.
I was directed by one of the attendants to the shelf where the split peas were to be had. When I got there and looked at the shelf I was momentarily transfixed. There were so many different brands and packages of split peas that I did not know which one to select. I now had a choice, quite unlike back in the day when split peas was placed on the restricted list of commodities.
This meant that its importation required an import licence. And this in turn translated to a virtual ban of the product since the absence of foreign exchange meant that the then government of the day was reluctant to have valuable foreign exchanged used up to import this most basic commodity.
As a substitute to the imported split peas, the government encouraged the population to use locally produced pigeon and black eye peas. The Guyana National Service was supposed to pioneer the mass production of the latter as part of the country’s drive to be self sufficient. Well this is what the population was told.
If the truth be known, then the people should have been told that the drive for self sufficiency was not the reason for the virtual banning of split peas and flour. It was the acute shortage of foreign exchange that created import restrictions and in order to justify the bans and restrictions on food items, the government came up with this idea of self sufficiency.
This was in the 1980s. But the bans and restrictions had begun just after the oil crisis of the 1970s and were not necessarily as a result of foreign exchange shortages.
The problem then was that Burnham was badly advised by two individuals who are now both deceased. They are no longer around to defend the advice that they gave to him, and which he adopted, to place import restrictions as a response to the oil crisis.
This was horrible advice.  The banning caused great unease within the middle class. They were no longer prepared to stay in Guyana without these basic food items. Many of them including the traditional shop-holding and business class began to migrate in large numbers. When they left, they sold their properties and they converted the money through a series of ingenious ways into foreign currency and left with it. The country was emptied further of foreign exchange. This exacerbated the crisis
The two gentlemen that advised Burnham to ban food items and restrict other imports had panicked. They felt that the rise in fuel prices would eat up all of foreign exchange reserves and so they advised him to ban and ban and ban. A long list of items was banned just after the oil crisis in the 1970’s.
It was a faulty logic as the PPPC showed a few years ago when it too was faced with a fuel crisis, one that was far worse than what the PNC experienced in the 1970s.
The Jagdeo administration did not go down the route that Burnham went. It did not try to restrict imports because it knew that in order to get out of any possible crisis the wheels of industry and commerce had to be kept turning. If the economy contracted, there would not have been any money at all to import the higher priced fuel.
And so instead of restricting imports, they ensured that industry was not affected by foreign exchange restrictions. They dealt with the problem by expanding imports thus allowing the economy to grow out of the crisis.
Burnham had taken the opposite route. He tried to curb the use of foreign exchange. This led to a contraction of imports including spare parts which were needed for industry. Without these spare parts, industry grounded to a halt, the economy contracted and the crisis got worse.
But you could not have told that then to the two men, now deceased, who advised Burnham on his strategy to deal with the oil crisis. They believed they knew it all. At times even believed they knew more than Burnham himself.
In the 1980s when the second wave of import restrictions took place, Jagan pointed out to Burnham the futility of banning flour. He indicated to him the general policy that you do not ban something unless you have a substitute to replace it and unless that substitute is available in adequate quantities.
There was no substitute for wheaten flour. Rice flour and cassava flour are not suitable substitutes. Jagan pointed this out to them but they would not listen. But even then they could not produce sufficient cassava or rice to make enough flour in the mill they imported from Brazil.
It was the same with split peas. There was not enough production to compensate. The much anticipated glut of production of split peas from the Guyana National Service never came. Burnham had once again put the cart before the horse. He had restricted an item without first assessing whether he could produce a substitute in adequate quantities.
In those days, Guyanese who desired split peas could not be bothered what brand it was or from where it came. It was so short in supply that people took it wherever it came from.

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