Why are food prices so high and the supply of food so unstable?

Jul 23, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Guyana has four climatic seasons: two rainy seasons and two dry seasons. But it matters not what is the season, once it gets dry for a few weeks or wet for a few weeks, vegetables and other cash crops become scarce and expensive.

It seemed just a few weeks ago that the farmers were complaining that the May-June rains had led to a shortfall in production. Prices naturally increased. But now that we have had a few scorching days of sun, there is an acute shortage of vegetables and other cash crops in the markets.

All of this makes a mockery of President’s Ali drive to make Guyana a major regional food supplier. If food is unaffordable in Guyana, especially for the poor, how can Guyana ever aspire to help contribute to reducing regional food insecurity?

This column has already unfrocked Guyana’s food security plans. It is nothing more and nothing less than the outsourcing of food security to northern Brazil. It is the Brazilians who stand to benefit from the plantation-scale production of corn and soya for which the Caribbean market will serve as an incentive. It is north Brazilian investors who will plough up our intermediate savannahs and produce grain for our local poultry industry. Indeed, north Brazil is already supplying us with frozen chicken.

Food security under the present PPPC government is not about empowering local farmers and making food cheaper for consumers. It is about enriching the Brazilians.

Guyana wants to become a global leader in food security. But charity begins at home and that is where the President’s attention needs to be focused: on how to ensure nutritious food is more accessible (including being cheaper) and that such foods are more readily available and the food supply more stable.

Guyana has long been self-sufficient in rice, meat, fish, vegetable, tubers, and roots. Yet Guyanese have a deficit when it comes to protein consumption.

The FAO has rightly observed that poverty, uneven incomes, and unemployment are some of the major food and nutrition challenges facing the country. Yet the focus of the government has been to ramp up food production. In fact, during his presentation at the Agri-Investment Forum held in Guyana, the President announced a number of food production targets.

The Ali administration likes to speak about CARICOM’s food import bill. But when the PPPC left office, Guyana’s food import bill was around US$273M, just about the sum Guyana earned from oil revenues in the first year of production. Apart from corn and soya, what are we doing to cut food imports? Imported bread is now being sold in Guyana.

The FAO has recommended a number of measures to address food insecurity. These include increasing the capacity of farmers to produce non-traditional commodities. How much has been achieved on this front?

In 2019, the Ministry of Agriculture said that Guyana exported around US$ 13 M in non-traditional agricultural exports. By 2021, the figure was around the same which means that little has been done under the PPPC to rapidly grow non-traditional agricultural exports.

The FAO has urged that farmers be trained in appropriate treatments for pre and post- harvest production. Yet today we still hear about 50% of pre-harvest and post-harvest crop losses. Half of what we produce is lost before it gets to consumers. Merely addressing this single issue would make food more accessible and cheaper for consumers.

The FAO had recommended encouraging value-added production. Yet, food processing has stagnated. Guyana has an abundance of fruits that are left to spoil because they cannot reach the markets on time and now farmers are not being provided with the knowledge and technologies to dry and preserve fruits.

The FAO also proposed in a 2017 report that fishing be encouraged as a socially desirable activity. The fishing industry is now in tatters. In response, the government has launched a project to promote fish farms and the cultivation of brackish shrimp which is in high demand within the diaspora. But the brackish shrimp project has not helped to support low-income earners, and the price of brackish shrimp has not been substantially reduced thus still keeping this source of nutrition out of the reach of the poor.

Guyana is also supposed to be self-sufficient in chicken. Yet Brazilian chicken which attracts a tariff can still be sold locally for $285 per lb. while locally-produced chicken, without any taxes, is retailing at $400 per lb., a price that keeps it out of the reach of the poor.

In the meantime, food prices and food supply in our markets remain unstable. And yet the one measure which can be used to help address the high cost of food is not being pursued. No one is asking the government to abandon commercial farming but if households can reduce their food incomes, without compromising nutrition, by 20%, this will be a great relief to households.

One simple way of doing this is through kitchen gardens. But the government is so tied into the bourgeois class that even promoting a simple and inexpensive measure such as kitchen gardens has fallen off its radar.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• expensive, Peeping Tom, production, seasons, unstable

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