The dream of feeding others while hungry at home

Dec 13, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – In recent times, the country’s leaders have been speaking with new conviction about Guyana’s destiny as the breadbasket of the Caribbean. This is not a new boast. It is an old dream, revived periodically like an heirloom taken from the cupboard, polished briefly, and then forgotten again.

But the new oil wealth has given the old fantasy fresh vigour. And so we are told that Guyana will soon supply food to the Region. We are sold the dream that the farms of our interior and the rich soils of our coastland will feed Caribbean mouths.

Yet one cannot help asking—quietly, almost apologetically—how is Guyana to feed others when we can hardly feed ourselves?

The irony, like much irony in Guyana, is both obvious and studiously ignored. We speak of exporting food even as the cost of vegetables in the market continues its upward drift, as if pulled by some invisible string beyond the reach of any policy or plan.

For decades, international economists and agronomists have explained one of the causes: the absence of concentrated production. We do not have scale. We do not have the large, contiguous farms that allow for efficiency, consistency, and volume. We have instead scattered plots, small efforts dispersed across wide areas, each too small to feed more than its immediate market and many not producing enough even for that.

This is the great unspoken truth. The country is not producing enough food—not in the numbers that matter, not in the quantities that make a difference.

A major food retailer in the United States, if asked to carry Guyanese produce, would  ask for volume—forty containers a week of a single product. It is a number that reveals everything. For except for rice and sugar, we cannot fill even one container a week of any crop. The scale simply does not exist. Yet we continue to behave as though it does.

How then are we to supply large markets? And if we cannot supply them, how are we to supply CARICOM? These are not hostile questions. They are questions born of the simplest logic. A country that must import bananas, tomatoes, and corn and even chicken from Brazil—Brazil, with its own immense internal demands—cannot credibly claim to be on the verge of feeding the region.

In fact, our food imports are rising, not falling. This alone makes a mockery of the campaign to reduce CARICOM’s food import bill by 25 percent by 2030. The slogan continues, the speeches are made, the targets are repeated, but the direction of the numbers betrays us.

The markets tell the story. If Guyana were producing substantial quantities of fruits and vegetables, prices would fall. They would fall because abundance does what speeches cannot—it imposes its own logic on the stalls and on the pockets of buyers. But prices in Guyana are not falling. They are rising. They rise because the quantities are small, the supply uncertain, the risks high. And so the consumer is reminded, week after week, that the great declarations of agricultural self-sufficiency exist only on paper and podiums.

This is the delusion at the heart of our national conversation: that because the soil is fertile, the food will appear. But fertile soil does not plant, irrigate, harvest, package, or transport itself. Productivity requires organisation, investment, scale. And these are precisely the things we have avoided confronting for half a century. We have preferred instead the sentimental image of the small farmer, heroic but forever impoverished, tilling his little piece of land. What we have not done is build the mega farms necessary to feed a nation and supply an export market.

Another unspoken truth is that such farms will not emerge organically. They require capital and expertise of a kind we do not yet possess. And so we look outward, tentatively, almost guiltily. The Brazilians have the scale, the machinery, the knowledge. But their gaze is fixed on corn and soya, crops they grow not for us but for themselves, and which they will export from our land only to feed their own industries. They will help us, yes, but only within the contours of their larger interests.

And so we must look farther, toward China—the one country that has built large farms across continents, often in the face of scepticism, sometimes in the face of hostility. But here we encounter yet another layer of our Caribbean drama: the Americans do not wish to see the Chinese deepen their presence in what they consider their backyard. And so even our hope for assistance is entangled in geopolitics.

What then remains? Only the recognition, painful but necessary, that Guyana must choose between illusion and effort. If we truly intend to feed the Region, we must first feed ourselves. To do that, we must produce more food—vastly more—and with a seriousness that has so far eluded us. We must abandon the romance of smallness and embrace the hard, industrial realities of large-scale agriculture.

Until then, the talk of feeding the Caribbean will remain what it has always been: talk, floating above a country that still imports the very things it claims it will soon export.

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

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• breadbasket, Caribbean, hungry, oil wealth, Peeping Tom

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