There is a number every Guyanese household has been quietly absorbing for the past five years that the country’s political conversation has not honestly engaged. Food prices in Guyana have risen by approximately seventy-five percent since 2020, even as the country has been producing record volumes of the very crops that feed it. Rice output has climbed from roughly 500,000 tonnes in 2020 to over 800,000 tonnes in 2025. Shrimp production has grown twelve-fold. Sugar has absorbed forty billion dollars of state investment. By every production metric the government can publish, agriculture is succeeding. By the metric that actually matters to families, what they pay at the market, it is not.
The disconnect is not a mystery. It sits in the distribution chain between the farm gate and the dinner plate. The Vice President himself, in his recent address to rice farmers at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, supplied the clearest example without naming it as such. Chicken sells for one hundred and twenty-five dollars per piece at the producer and reaches the consumer fried at six hundred and seventy-five dollars per piece. The gap between those two numbers is what the entire distribution system extracts on its way from farm to fork. No external shock explains it. The Middle East does not set the price of fried chicken on Sheriff Street. The war in Ukraine does not move the margin a Bourda Market vendor adds to a pound of cassava. These numbers are made in Guyana, by Guyanese intermediaries, inside a domestic supply chain that has never been subjected to the kind of competition analysis the Inter-American Development Bank just published for the wider region.
The IDB’s findings are direct. Markets across Latin America and the Caribbean are roughly four times more concentrated than in advanced economies. Firms charge markups averaging thirty-five percent above marginal cost. Workers capture only fifty cents of every dollar of value they create. In small economies like Guyana, with a population under eight hundred thousand and a handful of importers, wholesalers, and distributors dominating entire food categories, the concentration is almost certainly worse than the regional average.
The cassava episode the Vice President cited makes the point even more sharply. When the government offered to buy cassava at forty dollars per pound and announced a processing mill, the price tripled to one hundred and twenty-five dollars per pound within weeks. There is no agricultural commodity in the world whose marginal cost of production triples in a matter of weeks. That spike was not a production response. It was a rent-extraction response by intermediaries pricing in the government’s willingness to pay before any new cassava could possibly be planted, harvested, or processed. The Vice President named the symptom precisely. He did not name the disease.
The disease is a distribution layer that does not respond to demand the way competitive markets do, because it is not a competitive market. Three reforms would change the math. Published transparency of margins along the food supply chain, so citizens can see what farmers receive versus what consumers pay. Investigation by the Consumer Affairs Commission into coordinated pricing in concentrated food categories. And public procurement programmes that systematically favour direct farm-to-institution supply, bypassing the intermediary layer entirely.
A country producing record volumes of rice while its citizens cannot afford to eat what they grow has not solved its agricultural problem. It has solved one piece of it spectacularly and the other piece not at all. Production is a starting point. What we do with it, who captures it, and at what price reaches the table, is the policy question this country has been refusing to answer.