Your Eyewitness is hearing a lot about how at last we’re gonna become the “breadbasket” of the Caribbean!! This isn’t the first time he’s hearing this, of course – so he’s actually not jumping up and down and clicking his heels – yet!! When he was a knock-kneed kid in short pants, Burnham had assured the country that the good times were gonna be rolling with all the money we’d earn from supplying the Caribbean with food!! Our challenge would be how we’re gonna be able to spend the money! Burnham thought he was a smart fly and had first helped create then jump onto the CARIFTA and then the Caricom bandwagons that would be loading up from our food basket!
We all know – to our chagrin, if not our fury!! – that all his fancy plans – couched in his fancy words went to naught!! As in “duck”…zero…squat…zilch…nada or zilch!! Not only we couldn’t feed the Caribbean – we couldn’t even feed ourselves! And we ended up walking around with “white mouth” as we moved from being the “breadbasket” of the Region to being its “begging bowl”! So if we’re gonna avoid the Burnham Failure Syndrome, we better look where he went wrong.
Right off the bat, he tried to have his (racist) cake and eat it too. We have the potential to be a food basket not just because we have land and water coming out of our kazoos. Most importantly, it’s because we have folks who’re willing to have mud squelch between their toes. In other words, we got farmers!! And that’s something Burnham never appreciated – the need to give farmers incentives for doing their thing!! In fact, he did just the opposite!!
It just so happened because of historical circumstances, most of the farmers in Guyana are supporters of the PPP. But Burnham was gonna be damned if he’d let THEM rake in all that dough!! So he mandated that for our biggest agri export – rice – farmers had to sell all the paddy they harvested at a pittance – and he’d lap up the big bucks!! He then tried pushing the PNC supporters into farming – not only in rice, but in other crops and livestock. But chose a co-op model that was only geared for subsistence farming. Definitely not for competitive exports!! They failed!
So, up to now, the Ali government seems to be hitting all the right notes. They’ve tied in the Caricom Governments – led by the dynamic Mia Mottley – in a “25-by-25” agreement (to cut their US$5 billion food bill by 25% by 2025) from the demand side! And brought in large, professional companies to ensure we take care of the supply side!!
Let the market forces take care of business, baby!!
…on elections
Yesterday was LGE Nomination Day and unlike the past, there was quite a lot of interest this time around. So, what was different this time?? Were laws passed for LG bodies to be getting some of that oil money directly!??! THAT certainly would’ve generated interest!! But it wasn’t that – it was the experiment the PPP launched once they squeaked into office – to court the PNC’s constituency directly!
So, folks had their eyes on places like Den Amstel, Mocha-Arcadia, Ann’s Grove, etc, to see whether the PPP could get hundreds of individuals from these communities to not only place their John Hancocks on the nomination papers – but also to march with their red PPP shirts to the nomination centres!! This was the test of whether the PPP’s strategy of using development assistance to change ethnic voting would work. Well, it does look like the PPP was able to pass this first hurdle – they got their requisite nominations and marchers!
Now let’s see if they’ll get the votes too come June 12!!
…with ethnic funding
Democratic theory insists decisions must be made at the lowest level by the affected folks. The “shoe knows where it pinches” theory – aka “subsidiarity”. So is the PPP’s decision to fund Afro-Guyanese organisations directly following this principle??
