GUYANA Marketing Corporation (GMC) head Ida Sealey-Adams has said that produce from the backlands of Buxton/Friendship on the East Coast of Demerara is limited by ineffective drainage facilities which result in regular flooding and poor draining of farming beds.
Sealey-Adams was responding to claims by Buxton farmers that they suffer much because of lack of access to market for their produce. The farmers within the Buxton/Friendship Grantees Co-operative Society told the Guyana Chronicle recently that the GMC had visited the farm to assess the situation but still they had received no word on how the corporation would assist in marketing their products.
They said as long as they have orders and a reliable market for products they would be able to plant to meet the available demands.
However, the GMC head said the corporation’s assessment of the situation differs from what the farmers believe and the only way they can be helped was through improved drainage facilities.
“The main issue in Buxton is drainage. With the improved drainage they should be able to plant (on a larger scale). If it’s being flooded, the product will never meet market stage… Often time people say marketing but they don’t have products to market. That’s an area that was deprived of so many things. They never get to the marketing stage,” she told the Guyana Chronicle.
Buxton will be one of the four beneficiaries of the Caribbean Development Fund (CDF) Phase 2 funding project, which was established through a loan agreement with government through the Ministry of Finance.
The GMC, Guyana Livestock Development Authority (GLDA) and National Agriculture Research Institute (NARI) are responsible for pushing production and marketing in the communities, while the project is being executed by the Agricultural Sector Development Unit (ASDU) within the Ministry of Agriculture.
Chairman of Buxton/Friendship Grantees,Leroy Hamer,told the newspaper the GMC and NARI visited their farms but they have observed that none of the organizations was helping them make marketing progress.
“GMC need to do more work. NARI itself, they come and visit, but they need to do more and also give us the kind of courage as farmers to plant more. That is not happening,” Hamer said.
The Grantees farmers occupy several acres of land but more than half of it is untouched.
They produce their own plant nursery and are even considering selling baby plants providing that there is the demand.
“Providing that we say we get a market where we got to supply ‘X’ amount of plants, then we will know we got to set up we own nursery; we got to get people to tek care of these things… we ain’t got the resources to do it, we could just do what we doing until we could do more,” Hamer explained.
Apart from poor drainage the farmers complained also that there was need for time and energy-saving equipment to help prepare their farm lands so they could invest more time into producing.
“We’re doing physical work right now. We ain’t necessarily got to get a tractor here, but we would be glad if we could get like a ‘tiller.’ You get the land tiller to use it to prepare, at least that gon save you some energy that you could do other things.”
He said the farmers in the group plant according to what is in season and what is in demand on the market, and travel to Bourda and Stabroek Markets in Georgetown to find buyers of their multiple kinds of produce.
They are calling on the Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC) to put systems in place for the revival of the Buxton market, which was dissolved some years ago.
“Buxton once had market but after the market leave and gone to Annandale, it never come back to Buxton. It go to Lusignan, it go to Mon Repos. Everybody got a market day, Buxton don’t have a market day. They try a Sunday, but when you look at the couple of people and you look at the population of the village, we should get a market day… where everybody could just come out and purchase,” Hamer said.