By Dr. Mark Chatarpal
The information in this article comes from my doctoral fieldwork in 2018 and 2019 and has been edited for this column. I have changed respondents’ names to protect their identities. It has been eight years since the United States banned the importation of Guyanese catfish.
The American Catfish ban
On March 1st, 2018, fisherfolk and local exporters in Guyana were horrified to learn that the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) had banned the import of Guyanese catfish. The stated reason was Guyana’s non-compliance with the USDA’s updated sanitary regulations. The USDA’s move to support domestic catfish aquaculture had a substantial impact on the world’s catfish market. Fisherfolk communities in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Guyana were hit especially hard.
Before the collapse, a stable market in diaspora hotspots had sustained several fisherfolk communities along Guyana’s coastal strip. During my ethnographic research, I uncovered a story that never made it into Guyana’s media. The Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) had been notified of the USDA’s plans in advance. A senior policymaker, whom I will call Steve, then decided to fill out the USDA’s questionnaire single-handedly, without consulting any other branch of the Ministry. Several people I interviewed attributed this decision to the Ministry’s internal competition for influence. Whatever Steve’s motives, his actions helped cost the country the American catfish market.
The official story
In public, the Ministry said the USDA had imposed standards Guyana lacked the resources to meet. That was partly true. The rules required catfish-only storage and processing facilities, certified to USDA-equivalent standards and staffed by qualified inspectors during all operating hours. Guyana had no such infrastructure and no money set aside to build it. This explanation satisfied local journalists and supported the Ministry’s requests for development funding.
It also left out the most important part of the story.
What the Ministry’s experts told me
During my fieldwork, I gained consistent access to the MOA, including two senior policymakers I will call Rex and Bob. They were the real intelligentsia of the Ministry: people who wielded significant power and were indispensable to any administration. Like tenured professors, they felt relatively freer to share their unfiltered opinions. In their words, all they had been waiting for was a chance to speak with someone who “gets it.”
I asked about the major challenges their offices faced, expecting the usual discourse about needing resources. Instead, I listened to their frustrations with the politicians appointed to run the MOA. The politicians’ ideas about what ‘food security’ is often had little to do with what was feasible with the limited state resources available. Could much of Guyana’s national ‘food security’ issues simply come from a disconnect between what the appointed Minister wanted to implement and what was feasible? Surely the problem couldn’t be that straightforward, right?
Apparently it was.
Rex and Bob explained that they implemented whatever the Minister wanted with little pushback. Catering to ministerial ego was safer than risking their departments being shut out of decision-making or deliberately underfunded. There were few checks on the Minister’s power.
The conversation then turned to the opportunism inside the Ministry. Senior staff squabbled constantly to impress the Minister and raced to attach their names to new agricultural ventures, media clips, or anything else that promised positive press. Later interviews confirmed that staffers were perfectly happy, for example, to hold multiple dedication ceremonies for a single water pump station. Extension workers in the field already knew all this. Hearing it from senior experts at headquarters, though, showed me how structurally lopsided these institutions were.
When I pressed Rex about what had really happened with the catfish ban, the answer was deeply shocking.
Rex: The U.S. actually sent out a questionnaire last year; it was a self-assessment. And there is a crazy man over there [pointing to Steve’s office], he’s actually crazy. He took it upon himself to fill out the self-assessment form.
Me: On behalf of the country?
Bob: Yes, him alone.
[Rex and Bob laughing]
Rex: He fills the form out himself, and the idiot spoke about some documents that do not exist. How are you going to lie to FSIS [USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service]?
Me: The USDA?
Rex: Yeah, we don’t have a lawyer working with us and they (USDA) have a band of lawyers.
[The group laughs again]
Me: Here you have an entire country losing a huge sector of its thing because a guy checked the wrong box…right? …if I am getting this correctly?
Rex: yes, yes, yes, Yes [with increased vocal tones].
[Group laughter again]
Rex: Suh now he send de ting to de people [USDA], and they sent back. I can share the folder with you because it not no secret. The people now, USDA sent back now, a list now, showing their queries, everything [highlighted] in red, they querying every aspect of the self-evaluation.
[Imitating an American accent]
“You said that you had this inspection process, where is it?”
“You said you were using some field guide something, where is it?”
Rex: So after the US rejected [inaudible]…that assessment, they [the Minister and Steve] run come now and ask me now to come in and look at it.
And I’m like, ‘you said there’s this field guide, mister; where is this field guide? And what is the meaning of this words…from…GF…lewwe just say from GFIA. I said, wuhis duh really?’
Me: What is the meaning of the acronym? [In agreement]
Rex: Wha is da meaning of the acronym? He’s like [impersonating Steve] “Ummm, I can’t really remember, you know.”
Rex: I’m like, what! What an idiot! Why you mention de ting and don’t even know what it is! And then you can’t produce it [certifications] because he [Steve] doesn’t even know where that document is or anything…anyway so he even did some… he quoted from a law…there is no section like that in the law. The man even turn around and seh he wanted to make the answers perfect right, but how, you can’t lie to the people [USDA]…
The FSIS Self-Reporting Tool
This was an extraordinary revelation, but I needed more proof before believing it. In a separate interview that lasted over an hour, Bob confirmed that Steve had completed the FSIS Self-Reporting Tool with fabricated answers. I was given a soft copy of the document, on the condition that I keep identities private. Materials like this, I was told, belonged in the public domain where they could face professional scrutiny. No one in the local media had dug deep enough into the gilbaka tragedy to ask what the tool was or how the USDA used it to restrict Guyana’s exports.
The document was over seventy pages long, and its questions covered a wide range of concise inquiries about catfish, or Siluriformes. It was divided into six overarching sections: (1) Government Oversight, (2) Verification of Food Safety and Other Consumer Protection Requirements, (3) Government Sanitization Verification, (4) Government Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System Verification, (5) Government Chemical Residue Program, and (6) Government Microbiological Pathogen and Process Control Programs.
After a thorough review, it was clear that the current staff at the Ministry of Agriculture were not remotely capable of properly answering all the questions listed in this document. The experts I spoke with stressed that specialized international consultants were needed. According to interviewees, each section warranted its own team of skilled professionals working for eight months to a year. Instead, one man supplied the answers alone. Staff from the Ministries of Agriculture and Health began scrambling only after the USDA recommended the ban.
Speaking with Steve
With the turmoil occurring locally and throughout the diaspora marketplace, I had to interview Steve. He insisted on the session not being recorded, so I opted to jot a few notes down. I first asked about his personal definition of “food security”. He talked about the need for Guyana to regain its reputation as the agricultural hub of CARICOM, with the latest technology and young people interested in ‘high-tech’ agriculture. I sensed he was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear, so I asked him to describe that vision in more detail. He pictured thousands of acres of export-quality crops sprayed with pesticides by airplanes and harvested with expensive combines, the image of industrial soybean or corn mega-farms. He never mentioned small farmers or fisherfolk. For Steve, food security was firmly rooted in the aesthetic of industrial farming.
If Steve could contribute to the ruining of the gilbaka trade by including fake laws and certificates in the self-reporting tool, it wasn’t hard to imagine him eroding support for small-scale agriculturally based communities, predominantly Indigenous groups, to achieve his vision of ‘food security’.
Without revealing what I had learned, I then asked Steve to discuss what happened to the gilbaka market. He made no mention of the self-reporting tool incident and responded with the polished narrative the Ministry of Agriculture released to the press. At the conclusion of our interview, he asked who I had spoken to regarding the gilbaka situation. I deflected and said I was generally curious since it was a national issue. Little did he know that his own co-workers were deeply dismayed by what he had done.
Too little, too late
A few months later, I found out that the USDA had requested further clarification on a series of certifications that Steve claimed the Ministry had. The Minister held a series of emergency meetings and told all department heads to drop their tasks and work together to solve the issue. As the saying goes, it was too little, too late.
Members of the diplomatic community and other staffers at the Ministry of Agriculture told me that the USDA had warned the Ministry about the changes to sanitary regulations at least two years before the self-assessment arrived. That means the Ministry technically had enough time to make the necessary changes, or at least begin training staff, in hopes of securing additional grants or funds to build the infrastructure to USDA standards. Once the ban became national news, Steve was never named as being at fault.
This lack of oversight highlights a structural problem within the Ministry of Agriculture. As with most bureaucracies, the work tempo within the Ministry carries its own set of political rules. For example, I have seen authorization documents processed within a few minutes, rather than the standard week or more, because the applicant was a well-known party affiliate. More commonly, I have watched proposals from Indigenous peoples or organizations deliberately stalled over concerns that too much funding was being directed towards these groups.
Making the necessary changes
So how did the Ministry fix the gilbaka situation? Simply put, they didn’t. Instead, the Ministry urged the fisherfolk community to shift their sights to other aquatic species while they reacquired the proper licenses. The harsh fact was that the Ministry would be hard-pressed to remove the ban, because the government lacked the will to invest in building the proper processing facilities. With the potential GDP influx from oil revenue, the government’s priority turned to attracting investments from new oil companies, not renewing catfish licenses. Several interviewees mentioned that the Ministry of Agriculture’s mandate was simply to maintain the status quo. Meanwhile, the government would reorient Guyana’s economy towards relying on oil revenue instead of minerals, timber, and agricultural exports.
The broader question here was whether Guyana was even capable of making the required changes to accommodate the USDA’s stipulations. I posed this question in later interviews to Rex, and they collectively agreed it would be an uphill journey and borderline impossible to achieve without significant resources. In their answers, they identified four barriers. First, the USDA required the Ministry to build a single facility dedicated solely to processing siluriformes and built to USDA-equivalent standards. This facility could not be used to process any other fish species, but the export value of gilbaka was not high enough to warrant an entire processing facility.
Second, trained inspectors, preferably American-trained, would need to be on-site at all times. This meant that the Ministry of Agriculture needed to recruit, train, and actively retain a team of food inspectors. Given Guyana’s high levels of brain drain, the risk is that newly certified inspectors would seek work overseas once their contracts expired. Third, the Ministry of Agriculture saw little incentive to invest, judging that the demand for gilbaka was too weak to justify a long-term commitment. Little research or general consideration was given to potential market growth, despite a diaspora that far outnumbers Guyana’s own population.
Finally, there was the issue of litigation and the costs associated with maintaining up-to-date certifications. When Steve ‘invented’ the false certifications that were presented to the USDA, he placed the Ministry of Agriculture in a double bind. Once the error was discovered, the Ministry needed significant legal advice to undo the certification claims made on its behalf. Yet the Ministry has fewer than three lawyers on staff and only two with expertise in agricultural law, much less trade law. These lawyers are under constant pressure to represent the Ministry of Agriculture’s interests against countries or multi-million-dollar corporations that retain dozens of lawyers specializing in the fields of agriculture and international trade. As one interviewee noted, it has become the norm to attend international food conferences as the Ministry’s only legal representative in a room, facing more than forty lawyers vested in negotiating trade deals, and having to engage with them all on their own.
The fragility of Guyana’s food policy
What this fiasco with the catfish market taught me was just how vulnerable the country’s food export market is when the actions of singular individuals can cause a major disruption in the livelihood of several fisherfolk communities. We often assume that people’s right to food have more to do with supply chain or production issues, but we tend to overlook how bureaucratic systems themselves can lead to a breakdown in food policy.
It also showed me how interlinked the global supply chain is. A protectionist policy of a large economy like the United States to protect its own food systems can have immediate consequences for a smaller economy half a world away. It has been eight years since this tragedy occurred, and although Guyana is working to regain access to the U.S. market, the institutional breakdown within the MOA remains as relevant today as it was in 2018.
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