The countrywide cost-of-living crisis is choking middle- and lower-class households. A five-member family would probably need about $180,000 to buy sufficient, satisfactory food and to meet monthly housekeeping expenses. The cost of household essentials such as food, healthcare, rent, transportation and utilities (including electricity and water supplies) – has been rising steadily over the past fifty months. More than 40 per cent of the population live on less than $1,000 a day while food production and public sector salaries cannot keep abreast with the changing situation.
Women – particularly housewives – have been forced to spend more on basic food items at the expense of other essentials. Housewives bear the burden of the cost of adequate and affordable food – bread; cassava; cooking oil; eggs; fish; flour; milk; plantains; rice; sugar and sweet potato – in their market baskets and on their family’s dinner table. The high cost-of-living impairs the quality of life of vulnerable groups − aged, elderly, single-female-headed households, hinterland and rural residents, poor and unemployed – who need access to adequate and affordable food.
Former President David Granger, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recalled that, recently, resort had to be made to hasty to carry food from the Barima-Waini Region (No.1) to cushion the surge in the price of fruits and vegetables in the markets in the Demerara-Mahaica Region. Earlier, over 250 metric tonnes of cassava had to be rushed to the Rupununi Region where floods and foraging wild-life damaged farms. Cassava is essential to staples such as cassava bread, casareep and farine.
The cost-of-living crisis has been exacerbated by the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) administration’s strategic economic choices despite huge annual budgets which surged to $1.146 trillion in 2024 and high annual withdrawals of $739 billion from the Natural Resource Fund. The PPPC administration has made strategic executive decisions to prioritise dazzling infrastructure projects but its allocations for the alleviation of the cost-of-living and the occasional doling out of small cash grants to public sector workers, teachers and nurses and pensioners have not reduced the cost of food. People cannot eat roads.
Mr. Granger bemoaned the PPPC administration’s apparent rejection of stable and sustainable employment and a realistic salaries and wages policy in preference to its contemptuous practice of cash-grants, casual job-work and short-term food fairs. Further, the country needs robust measures to resolve the crisis, above all, by directing investment towards achieving the goal of food security by 2030 and investing in drainage and irrigation and farm-to-market particularly in the hinterland.
Highways on the coastland are nice but transport infrastructure (air, land, shipping-sea freight and refrigeration) to food-producing hinterland regions is necessary. It is quite obvious that the PPPC administration has not initiated a major highway within the Barima-Waini, Cuyuni-Mazaruni, Potaro-Siparuni and Rupununi Regions over the past fifty months. Inadequate farm-to-market access and ineffective irrigation systems lead to losses from farm-to-table, deterioration of goods, artificial shortages and high food costs. Investments, however, have been misdirected to fanciful brackish water shrimp, Pacific white-leg shrimp and cut-rose projects.
The former president iterated his opinion that food is at the core of the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis and that housewives have borne the brunt of the high cost of food. Guyana should embrace, unequivocally, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal – to “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” For this goal to be achieved, agricultural policy should be realigned – by increasing investment in agriculture; doubling the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers; improving hinterland to coastland transportation infrastructure and introducing innovative agro-processing technology to ensure that every mother’s child is nourished and can enjoy a happy and healthy life.
