Support Village Voice News With a Donation of Your Choice.
Many years ago, Guyana boasted of being self-sufficient in many areas. One of them was supposed to be eggs, another was green vegetables and yet another was ground provision. Indeed, the country was self-sufficient in rice and sugar.
Then came the time when poultry rearing moved away from the so-called yard fowl to the sophisticated white birds that have become a staple. Today, I realise that the concept of self-sufficiency cannot apply to Guyana.
The eggs are dependent on imported layers; the chickens are reliant on imported hatching eggs, and the feed for these animals are all but imported. I remember when hatching eggs did not come so Guyana resorted to importing chicken. The meat came in 40-pound boxes.
We are still importing chicken.
The most strident complaint is about the high cost of living. Chicken that was retailed at $240 per pound is now twice that sum, if not more. The price of eggs has doubled as has the price of just about everything. Even the locally grown fruits and vegetables cost about twice as much as they did a year ago.
I have since heard that the war in Ukraine has pushed up the cost of the foods. Ukraine may be responsible for the high price of flour since it exports some 30 per cent of the world’s wheat. It is also a large oil producer so perhaps the cost of transportation would have mounted.
But many of the foods that have nothing to do with imports or the war in Ukraine are fetching astronomical prices.
Cassava a few months ago sold at three pounds for $100. Plantain was the same. Now one pound of either is $200 (US$1). This forced many of the older people to remember the war years. Guyana was made to become dependent on imports like salt fish, salted pork, canned foods, vegetables like peas and beans and potatoes.
Necessity is the mother of invention. The local farmers turned up their production to unprecedented levels. Pretty soon, Guyana was self-sufficient. In fact, it became the bread basket for the rest of the region. The war ended; the colonials insisted on selling their surpluses to Guyana, so once more there was the dependence on imported foods, fruits and vegetables. Local production lagged. Self-sufficiency disappeared.
The 1973 oil crisis came. Rough days visited Guyana once more; once more the people turned to the land; once more there were local foods in abundance. But some colonial-minded people wanted to eat like their overlords so the imports kept coming. Now with the war in Ukraine imports may have slowed but the price is horrendously high. Not to be outdone, the smart local producers have decided that they should cash in on the bonanza provided by people who woke up to the realization that they cannot eat the money.
How else can one explain that locally grown foods like ground provisions, rice, and green vegetables cost so much more? Ask about the reason and people will tell you that all over the world prices gone up. I suppose that if prices ‘gone up’ all over the world, Guyana got to copy and make the prices go up too. But I believe that the prices for the locally-produced goods have been overdone. There is nothing that fetches the same price as a year ago. The rains have come, intermittently, signaling that greens and the like would be in abundance.
Sadly, that abundance is not reflected in the price in the marketplace. Speaking with visitors to the country, many say that food in Guyana is more expensive than food in New York, when one does the currency conversion. And to think that the local wages and salaries are nothing compared to the wages and salaries in New York.
What someone earns in an hour as minimum wage, the low level Guyanese is surviving on half for an entire day, according to the World Bank. People can now understand why Guyanese continue to flee the country. They all believe that they cannot do worse elsewhere.
Many people rely on remittances to survive; landlords have the devil’s own job to collect rent hence conflict; men become violent when wives and children clamour for food, some of them not having eaten all day. But this should not happen in this oil rich country. Recently, the political opposition contended that the people who are doing just that bit better than public servants are the fishermen and cane cutters. Small wonder that young people don’t want to see school.
And for some strange reason, one does not see the discarded piles of greens and other perishables at the side of the roads. This has nothing to do with President Irfaan Ali’s clean-up campaign. It simply means that vendors are holding on to their goods a bit longer to the point of selling foods that they would normally have discarded.
But there are some visitors who would insist that things are not so bad in Guyana. They point to the lines outside the fast food outlets. If people did not have money, then they could not afford to be in those lines. What the foreigner does not know is that most of the people in the lines are women. These are resourceful people.
As an aside, when one has dogs one would suffer the dogs with a piece of food. People would make them sit or jump or do anything just because the dog wants the food.
The government has the food and many dogs are looking and salivating.
