Guyana was never any breadbasket

Oct 18, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Guyana was never the breadbasket of the Caribbean. The development of peasantry following Emancipation exposed the weaknesses of small scale, undercapitalized agriculture.
The peasantry was not a highly profitable venture as the ill-informed are making it out to be. The villages that planted the plots which they had acquired after purchasing abandoned sugar and cotton plantations were besieged by problems, not the least of which was flooding from the release of water from the sugar lands or from poor drainage and irrigation.
The colonial authorities employed a variety of devices aimed at frustrating the village movement around which the peasantry industry was constructed. These are well known and need not be repeated here. The fact of the matter is that Guyana never had a successful local peasant industry which could have satisfied the food needs of the population. Even in colonial Guyana, food was imported in large quantities, and it is this importation which was responsible for the swift development of a merchandise – trading class in Guyana.
Food was always short. At times it became expensive. This is why there were so many incidents of strikes and unrest.
Guyana therefore must avoid seeing the post-Emancipation experience in agriculture as representing some heroic exercise. It was an attempt at trying to ensure an existence independent of the sugar plantations, but it was never represented a revolution in agricultural production. This was evident in the domination of local agriculture by plantation agriculture, particularly sugar. Later, rice developed as a major crop.
Guyana, despite the emphasis on large scale sugar and later rice cultivation, has always harboured the dream of becoming the breadbasket of the Caribbean. Guyana never became the breadbasket, because of the insular agricultural policies which are practiced in the West Indies, and which still stand as the greatest obstacle to trade in agricultural products.
If there is any reason why the Caribbean Community should be dissolved, it is because of its failure to improve intraregional trade in agricultural products. Caricom has failed at the one thing at which it should have been a success story, the trade in agricultural products. It failed because the focus has been on integrating markets rather than production.
There was never any reason why Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica were all at the same time producing sugar. One country, the one with the greatest comparative advantage in sugar production, should have been producing sugar, while the other countries should have been either processors or consumers of the sugar.
But there were also other reasons for the lack of specialization. Europe was not interested in an integrated regional sugar or rice industry. They were keen to ensure an adequate supply of sugar and rice for their economies and the only way to ensure this was to keep regional suppliers divided.
Europe did this by offering a preferential market for sugar and rice, sugar, bananas, and rum. And so these industries in the Caribbean were devoted for more than three decades to providing these products to Europe.
The Caribbean today is paying for its high concentration on these products. It is paying a high price, as evident in the downsizing, closure and imminent closure of these industries with the exception of rum, which itself is facing major challenges.
A new agricultural sector has to be created in the Caribbean. And yet the signs are that the same mistakes of the past are going to be made. The Caribbean is looking at establishing a stronger integrated market for trade in agricultural products, when instead it should have been looking at integrated food production.
Guyanese therefore must not assume that we are mere years away from becoming the breadbasket of the Caribbean. The Caribbean is a basket case. The Caribbean was slothful in providing disaster relief. How then can one expect the Caribbean to begin to feed itself? We cannot even reach an agreement on a prohibition of not buying rice from outside of the Caribbean.
There was a time when Guyanese could not feed themselves. There was a time when people ran to the smaller islands so as to avoid the shame of not being able to put a decent meal on their children’s table. There was a time of acute food shortages in Guyana. The breadbasket dream died a long time ago.
The idea of Guyana becoming the region’s breadbasket is a forlorn dream. It is not going to happen, not in the insular Caribbean and not from Guyana. When oil comes, agriculture will no longer be needed.

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