Dear Editor,
While the politicians squabble for power, Guyana and Guyanese are being left behind in development.
What is needed is someone (or a group of people) with a vision on how to get Guyana developed so that we close this massive gap.
When I talk about a massive gap, I mean Guyana does not manufacture calculators, computers, ships, cars, aircraft, space crafts, etc. Yet, we can be very pretentious in pretending that since we can buy these things (to a certain extent) we are doing okay.
What Guyanese need to do is to first map the technology.
As an example, we start simple, by having a farm which produces fruits, vegetables and ground provisions in a large-scale as this tends to reduce prices. Then we look at – say from cherry – producing jams, juices and fruit salads (we can do the same with many other fruits…like pineapple). With rice farms already in existence, we should be looking to manufacture rice cereal (pop rice), rice cakes, etc.
With timber, we should be looking to produce logs, furniture, house frames, paper, etc.
In this way, we can turn Guyana into a manufacturing centre. What is needed is the political will, the understanding of how to transmit this information of manufacturing to the farmers, etc.
It is all good and proper to say plant plantain and make plantain chips but people need to be taught how to do these things as well as have enough financial resources to live on while their businesses develop.
It is no good saying plant plantain and make plantain chips to a small farmer because to be commercially feasible you need medium- to large-scale farms.
We can do this with most technologies like bauxite, to an alumina plant to aluminium (I do not suggest that we start building an alumina plant as it is too costly). The good thing is that Guyanese do not need to research and develop the technologies as they are already in existence.
What is needed is the political will to understand that you need to teach people how to produce cherry jam, cherry juice, fruit salad, etc. Or, would Guyanese prefer to remain in stasis? I think not!
Yours faithfully,
Sean Ori
