The Guyana Marketing Corporation Reborn

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I. The Price of Chicken

The Ministry of Finance’s Mid-Year Report puts the matter plainly. Between December 2025 and June 2026, Georgetown consumer prices rose 4.4 per cent; food prices rose 6.7 per cent and contributed 3.4 percentage points of that rise. The report lists imported inflation, increased demand, retail mark-ups and unfavourable weather among the main factors. A July 2025 press comparison of selected items in the GMC’s own market-price records found them averaging more than 75 per cent higher in May 2025 than in May 2021 — a selected-market comparison, with no published item list or weights, not the official index. In an economy whose average growth since 2022 the IMF ranks the world’s highest, those are the increases a working family meets at the stall.

The government’s response has been to reach, without naming it, for an instrument it dismantled forty years ago. It has used the New GMC to facilitate temporary chicken imports, distributed through local suppliers, and the Corporation’s September 2026 notices advertised whole plucked chicken at $360 a pound at named market squares. In December 2025 it was selling eggs at $1,300 a tray against the $1,500 to $2,500 then reported at Bourda and Stabroek, and it advertised the same price into January. It has held government-backed farmers’ markets and proposed a wider rollout, presenting direct sale as the way to narrow the spread between what the farmer is paid and what the shopper is charged. The President has called for modern storage so that the country can hold a buffer stock of poultry and other produce, and has pointed, more than once, at retailers he says charge “exorbitant” mark-ups on goods bought cheaply from farmers.

Each of those is a piece of the old Guyana Marketing Corporation: the state as buyer, the state as seller, the state as holder of stock between harvest and shortage, the state as the discipline on the middleman. What is missing is what made the old GMC an institution rather than a reflex — a mandate written down, with a budget voted for it, a limit on what it may lose, and a published account of what it did. This essay argues for restoring that mandate, narrowly and for a fixed term, and for the condition without which it should not be restored at all.

II. A Wartime Instrument

The state marketing body was not invented by Cheddi Jagan or Forbes Burnham. It was built across the British Caribbean between 1939 and 1942, by colonial governments that would have called themselves anything but socialist, as the war squeezed shipping and the cost of living climbed. The West India Committee Circular for 1942 — twelve months of the London lobby’s own newsletter — records the pieces being put in place, colony by colony, month by month.

In September 1941 the Barbados House of Assembly petitioned the Governor to subsidise the import of the foodstuffs “commonly purchased by the working classes.” Trinidad’s Food Controller announced guaranteed minimum purchases of local food crops at selected depots; by October 1942 Jamaica was pegging prices, a Price Stabilization Committee advising its Food Controller. British Guiana’s Commodity Control Board took charge of imports, maximum prices and bulk purchases; a voluntary rice ration of fourteen ounces a week was introduced; and the Governor forwarded an application for a £5,297 grant to provide a Marketing Officer for five years, while Sir Frank Stockdale, the Comptroller for Development and Welfare, wrote that the Essequibo Coast “offered possibilities of building up a new form of peasant economy and production.” Dr. H. A. Tempany published the same year a survey of the region’s agricultural marketing, from information gathered in 1940, arguing the case for organised internal and inter-colonial marketing.

What matters in that record for 2026 is that these were practical measures, taken under pressure by governments with no socialist programme: what a small open economy does when the price of its food is set by forces it cannot control.

III. The Corporation of 1964

The Guyana Marketing Corporation was constituted under Order No. 97 of 1963, made under the Public Corporations Ordinance of 1962, and began operations on 1 January 1964 — conceived in the last months of the Jagan premiership and inherited, before its first year was out, by Burnham. Its report to the Legislature for 1965 describes the model without embellishment: a network of Produce Depots obliged to buy the marketable produce offered at their purchasing stations, at guaranteed minimum prices or the ruling market rate as conditions allowed; a Fish Marketing Centre; processing, ham-and-bacon and milk-pasteurisation plants; edible-oil distribution; and the North West District Farmers’ Marketing Co-operative acting as the Corporation’s agent. The wartime kit of 1942 had become a permanent institution whose declared business was to buy.

The same report records the flaw that would undo it. Produce from remote purchasing stations spoiled in transit; the depots sold below cost and dumped what was unmarketable; and at the Fish Marketing Centre, cold storage was so inadequate that fish had frequently to be “disposed of at uneconomic prices in order to avoid heavy losses from spoilage.” A price floor for the farmer, a perishable product, and storage that could not keep what was bought: the trap was in the design, on the record by 1965. The GMC was buying what it could not keep and selling what it could not hold for a better market.

It is worth pausing on who ran it. Eusi Kwayana — then Sydney King — was appointed chairman of the Guyana Marketing Corporation on 26 April 1967, one of several public trusts he held in those years alongside the Land Settlement Committee and the conversion of the Co-operative Bank, and he still held the chair in 1971, when he presented to the West Indies Agricultural Economics Conference in Georgetown “The Impact of Guyana Marketing Corporation on Agricultural Diversification in Guyana,” an assessment of the institution by the man then running it. The man who died last week knew the GMC from the inside — what it could do for the small farmer, and what it would take to keep it honest — and he spent his public life demanding that the state answer to its people in writing. That is why the proposal at the end of this essay carries his name.

The GMC Supermarket, which sold fresh fruit, vegetables and meat for decades, was succeeded in 2012 by the Guyana Shop, which by the Corporation’s 2023 account had helped develop and market more than 3,000 locally made products. The retail line survived. What was broken, in 1985, was the mandate.

IV. 1985

The GMC did not die. It was hollowed out. In 1985 — the year Burnham died and Desmond Hoyte took office, three years before the IMF and World Bank Economic Recovery Programme — the Corporation’s policy was changed, by the Ministry of Agriculture’s own account: a total cessation of buying and selling, and a reassignment to “market facilitation services” for private exporters of non-traditional produce. The timing is suggestive rather than proven: the change preceded the ERP’s announcement in 1988 and its launch in 1989; its instrument and its rationale are not in the published record. By the time the ERP arrived, the state-as-trader model was already dying in Georgetown, as it was nearly everywhere else.

What survived is the New GMC: a price-monitoring unit, an export-documentation office, packhouses with cold storage at Sophia and Parika, and the Guyana Shop. It collects the daily price data; it has no standing duty to act on it, though the occasional egg sale shows it can. It has the cold rooms the 1964 Corporation could only have wished for; nothing requires it to fill them against a bad season. It is, in other words, every component of the old instrument except the one that made it an instrument.

There is an irony in this that the oil economy has made visible. The 1985 retreat, whatever drove it, was made by a state that could not pay its bills. The 2026 interventions — chicken at $360 a pound, eggs at $1,300 a tray, farmers’ markets — are being run by a state with the largest revenues in its history, through an agency whose published mandate is facilitation, not trade. What has been published describes temporary imports, limited sales and market initiatives; it sets out no standing mandate, no trigger, no release rule and no register. The country has the money, the cold rooms and the data. What it has not done is decide, in writing, what it is doing.

The country has the money, the cold rooms and the data. What it has not done is decide, in writing, what it is doing.

— T.R.B.

V. What Oil Changes

The 1964 Corporation failed on three counts, and the oil economy gives the country better means to address each of them.

It could not keep what it bought: storage was inadequate by its own early account, so a guaranteed price for perishables was too often a guaranteed loss. The New GMC now has cold rooms at Sophia and Parika; whether it has a cold chain — refrigerated transport, reliable power, maintenance, stock rotation — is a question the pilot proposed below is designed to answer, because a cold room without the rest is a building. It had no fiscal cushion, so a bad year’s losses fell on a treasury that could not bear them; the Natural Resource Fund can bear a capped reserve, which is a different thing from an open-ended one. And it had nothing like today’s price data; the New GMC’s daily survey of wholesale and retail prices is a real asset, though it is a price survey, not the procurement intelligence — volumes, quality, seasonality, regional shortage — that buying at scale requires.

What the oil economy has also done is recreate, in a new form, the problem the old GMC was built for. In 1942 the price of imported food was set by the war. In 2026 oil-funded demand presses against what local agriculture can supply, while wages, imported inputs, transport and weather push costs up behind it; the IMF’s October 2026 assessment sees no clear overheating yet, but lists it among the risks and singles out strong wage growth — real appreciation through domestic prices and wages, not a dearer dollar — for monitoring. The Ministry’s own list of causes is the wartime list with the U-boats replaced by a boom. The analogy is one of exposure: a small economy whose food prices are being moved by forces larger than its farms.

What today’s interventions lack is not money. It is a mandate: a legislated obligation to buy, hold and release a short list of staples when prices spike, with a budget voted for the purpose, a limit on what it may lose, and an account of it laid before the National Assembly. Chicken at $360 is a press release. A buffer stock with a published trigger price is a policy.

VI. A Narrow Mandate, and a Kwayana Clause

The strongest case is not for the 1964 everything-depot. It is for a GMC with a mandate narrow enough to be judged, limited enough to be afforded, and short enough to be stopped. Its one purpose is to moderate temporary shortages and the price spikes they bring; what it does for farmers along the way is a consequence, not the mandate.

1. A reserve that moderates spikes, not a price it guarantees. The Corporation buys a short, published list of staples when wholesale prices fall below a published buying trigger, holds them, and releases them when retail prices rise above a published release trigger. It promises to blunt a spike, not to hold a price forever: when prices stay high and the reserve is spent, the reserve is spent, and the public is told so. Three staples, three storage regimes — rice in dry bulk, frozen poultry in cold chain, eggs in short-cycle rotation — each with its own buying trigger, release trigger and loss cap, because one buffer-stock model cannot serve all three. The operating rules must also provide for initial stocking, routine replenishment and minimum stock levels — a reserve that only ever buys cheap can be empty when the shortage comes.
2. A published spread, not a price control. The weekly gap between the GMC’s recorded wholesale price and its recorded retail price is published by commodity. A wide spread is not proof of profiteering — transport, spoilage, handling and credit live inside it — but a published spread lets the public and the Competition Commission see which margins can be explained and which cannot.
3. A reserve with a published cost. The pilot is funded by a capped appropriation — oil money at its source, drawn through the Natural Resource Fund’s annual withdrawal into the Consolidated Fund, and voted by the National Assembly in each of the pilot’s two years — with its full cost published as a line of its own: storage, power, transport, staffing, spoilage, trading losses and any operating subsidy. A reserve not accounted for separately is vulnerable to diversion; the parastatals of the 1970s are the proof.
4. A pilot with an expiry date. Two years, three commodities, one independent review by a body outside the Ministry of Agriculture, and automatic lapse unless the National Assembly votes to renew on the review’s evidence. The pilot should also settle whether the Corporation holds the stock itself or contracts private firms to store and release it — the accountability rules here bind either arrangement. And the review’s test is set in advance: did the reserve reduce the duration and severity of shortages at a reasonable public cost, and what did it do to spoilage and to private storage and trade.
5. The Kwayana clause. Every supplier contract, purchase quantity and price, stock movement, sale, spoilage write-off and declared conflict of interest is published quarterly in a register, audited annually by the Auditor General, with named consequences for irregularities. Eusi Kwayana chaired this institution, and he spent his public life demanding exactly this accounting. Disclosure alone does not stop patronage; disclosure, audit and penalty together make it expensive. A reborn GMC without all three is the 1970s parastatal come again, with a cold room attached. It should not be built.

Now the objections, and they are serious. A public reserve can lose money. It can displace the private storage and trading it is meant to steady. And it can become a vehicle for political allocation. Three answers. First, the mandate above intervenes at the edges of the price range, not across it; between the two triggers the private trade runs as it does now. Second, the defences against displacement are scale, transparency and review: three staples, purchases at published prices in the open market, and an independent evaluation of the reserve’s effects before any renewal is voted. Third, the alternative is not the free market. It is what we have now — ad hoc chicken, ad hoc eggs, ad hoc farmers’ markets, announced and funded as the moment requires, with no trigger, no release rule, no register and no end date. A narrow, published, time-limited mandate offers clearer limits and greater accountability than an unlimited unpublished one.

The 1965 spoilage losses, the 1970s parastatal patronage and the 1985 retreat are not arguments against a marketing corporation. They are the specification for one that works.

Chicken at $360 is a press release. A buffer stock with a published trigger price is a policy.

— T.R.B.

VII. The Decision Withheld

In 1941 a colonial legislature in Bridgetown, with no oil and no sovereignty, looked at the price of flour and asked its Governor for a bill. In 1964 a newly self-governing Guyana made the buying of farmers’ produce the declared business of a public corporation and from 1967 put the most incorruptible man in the country in charge of it. In 1985 a state that could not pay its bills withdrew the mandate. In 2026 a state with the largest revenues in its history is running the old instrument by press release, through an agency whose stated purpose is something else.

The decision this essay asks for is specific. Write the mandate down. Make it narrow, cap it, and give it an end date. Fund the reserve through the budget and publish its full cost. Publish the triggers, the spread and the books, and audit them. The Government has already used the GMC to facilitate chicken imports and advertise its sale; it has only declined to say what it is doing in a form that can be held to.

Baba Eusi spent eighty years asking the state to answer to its working people in full and in public. A Marketing Corporation that buys their produce at a published price and sells it to them at a published price, and prints every transaction in between, is the smallest possible version of that demand. It is also, this October, the one most within reach.

The working people of this country cannot wait for the market to correct the price of eggs. They can insist that the state which intervenes do so in writing.

Be well.

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