By Stabroek News
Dear Editor,
The caption screamed the pain of poor Guyanese: 鈥淏asic food items up 75% in the last four years鈥 (Demerara Waves, July 4, 2025). For those longing for some statistics pulled from real-life, the records of the New Guyana Marketing Corpora-tion (NGMC), stand on their own feet, speak for themselves. For one reason only. They present the struggles, and pain, of Guyana鈥檚 poor. The only p word (capital P) that is highlighted today is price. Food prices, basic ones. The only G word employed isn鈥檛 related to national management, but Guyanese.
How do they manage? How, when basic food items, such as greens and ground provisions, have gone up so steeply in the last four years? The grim picture and specter have been shared weekly for scores of weeks with religious regularity by Stabroek News via its 鈥淐ost-of-Living鈥 series. As a forerunner to the Demerara Waves article, residents from many communities across Guyana have bewailed the price of rice, oil, and cooking gas. Pak Choy and rice, oil and eddo, and flour and chicken, are not the stuff of gourmets. They are the poor man鈥檚 and distressed woman鈥檚 bread and butter items. I took a rare foray to the Bourda Market and a cucumber is $150 (not $80), and Pak choy starts from $200 a bundle. Strangers and tenderfoots usually get slammed.
The NGMC is not a private enterprise entity, nor a private citizen contributing in the public space. Hence, it should be speaking to truth and reality, as opposed to those who have been doubted when they question official statistics. Speaking to a very senior man in the private sector recently on a pricing issue, he brought up how official stats can represent inflation at a gorgeous 2.5% level. I acknowledge that it was not food inflation per se, but there is this starkly revealing portrait of basic food prices up 75%. Nothing that comes close to double digits has ever seen the light of day before from national experts. Those who live richly pronouncing on prices. I use official, and not the g word, which should be enough.
Re inflation, and the NGMC records, it is common knowledge that averages are employed. All things being equal, using that convention means that some basic food items stay the same, some fall slightly, and some soar, from which an average is derived. How an overall inflation rate of 2.5% was arrived at in the last four years is a mystery to me, a torture for the Guyanese food shopper. I invite anyone to select their basket of basics, one common to almost all ordinary citizens, and separate that from general inflation, and see how well they do. Official stats are not just denounceable, they are deplored as some sort of con game played on weak, vulnerable Guyanese. A little less sharply, those who manufacture those stats come across as deceivers of a very callous kind.
Aside from the numbers [maybe alongside them might be wiser], I shiver to think how the minimum wage worker in Guyana manages to exist. At $60,000 monthly in the private sector, and approx. 50% more in the public sector, it bewilders how they survive in a steeply rising price environment. How do the single parent and the elderly on fixed pensions (perhaps only one) and with no foreign financial stipends to help them get by, how do they cope? What can they buy, and how much? This is not related to nails and zinc sheets, or a new skirt and footwear, as urgently needed as those may be, but of food that must be consumed daily. The range of items that belong in a basic food basket doesn鈥檛 change that drastically, if at all. Neither grapes nor foreign mandarin oranges nor salmon are included. Just local items. Essential ones for a simple meal.
It is a shame that this is how much basic food prices have risen, as have been written all along, but dismissed on each occasion. Ten percent doesn鈥檛 cut it; so also does a belated cash grant, or paltry pension increase. Instead of those in charge twisting their tongues to talk about their twisted numbers, I exhort them to talk to the truths embedded in these food prices. It is a disgrace, a global one I think, that Guyanese celebrated as being among the richest anywhere, and across the board (averages again) cannot buy basic food items, or must be content with less of them. All this national wealth, and this is the health of the have nots in the most internationally cheered country.