“Food security” seems to be on everyone’s mind these days, and for good reason. Guyanese are feeling the strain each time they visit the market, roadside vendor, or grocery store, whether owned by longstanding members of their communities or by the recent wave of foreign-owned businesses.
In May 2026 alone, the Consumer Price Index reported that the cost of vegetables and vegetable products rose by 19 percent from the previous four months, an alarming figure that neither the Ministry of Agriculture nor the Office of the President has adequately addressed. And the official index does not capture the full weight of what households are experiencing, particularly outside Georgetown and other coastal hubs such as in the South Rupununi or Upper Mazaruni. The figure should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling.
I had intended to make that percentage change tangible by demonstrating the increase in the price of a bundle of bora, then and now. I could not. The Ministry of Agriculture’s daily market prices have not been updated on its website since June 2025. That absence is not a small administrative lapse. Prices are the instrument through which a ministry watches its own food system move. A ministry that does not publish the price of bora cannot credibly tell the public what is happening to the cost of food, and cannot itself know.
The increasing rate of food inflation does not sit comfortably beside the government’s 2023 long-term plan, Guyana’s National Pathway for Food Systems Transformation, which commits the State to improving citizens’ access to nutritious, fresh, healthy, and affordable produce. The commitment is the right one. The distance between it and the market stall is the problem. This distance has been reported across the media, raised by civil society and acknowledged by senior government officials, including Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo.
Into this arrives the recent controversy over President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali’s farm at Long Creek, along the Soesdyke-Linden Highway. The public debate has focused, understandably, on the farm’s ownership, financing, acreage and possible misuse of public resources. These questions of transparency matter and should not be easily dismissed, and other people are pursuing them.
I am interested in a different question, which has received far less attention. Set aside, for the length of this column, who owns the farm and how it was paid for. Look only at what it is. What kind of food future does this model of production imagine for Guyana, and is it the one we want? Begin with a distinction we use loosely. The word “farm” carries an ideological aesthetic: someone working the land, a few animals, familiar crops and a household earning an honest living. Not every farm operates in this way. An operation with automated poultry houses, feedlots, specialized machinery, skilled support staff, large livestock and aquaculture populations, extensive infrastructure, and production designed for large markets is a different kind of thing altogether. It is industrial agriculture, and it should be named as such.
There is nothing wrong with President Ali owning an industrial farm. What matters is that we categorize the model accurately. By scale, technology, capital requirements, and labour arrangements. This categorization matters because it tells us which food system is being held up as exemplary for everyday Guyanese.
The same imprecision runs through the phrase “family business.” A company can be family-owned and still be nothing like a family farm. Bounty Farm may be privately or family-owned; it is also Guyana’s largest poultry producer, vertically integrated from hatchery through rearing, processing and retail. The Food and Agriculture Organization defines family farming by its reliance on family management and family labour, not by whose surname sits on the certificate of incorporation. I watched this distinction surface during focus groups convened by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, in a room of agricultural specialists, and it was met with much disdain.
Why insist on this distinction? Because industrial agriculture carries benefits, risks, and political consequences quite different from those associated with a small farmer, a household with a kitchen garden, a villager who has a cassava patch, or fisherfolk braving the Atlantic Ocean or the Demerara River. Industrial farms can produce large volumes, use technology efficiently, heavily influence policymakers, and create jobs. This model can reduce certain imports and supply regional markets based on its ability to scale.
However, scale should not be confused with the thing food security was meant to describe in the first place. The question was never only whether food exists. It is whether people can obtain it, and whether it nourishes them when they do. This is how a country raises output while food becomes less affordable, and Guyana is becoming an example of exactly that. It can export more while children consume poor-quality diets; critiques of the national school feeding programme have provided ample evidence of this. The government can build modern poultry houses while small farmers continue to struggle to obtain drainage, subsidized transportation, cold storage, credit, and reliable markets. The President can describe Guyana as food self-sufficient at the same time a household earning under a hundred thousand dollars a month is rationing basic starches and treating fresh fruit and vegetables as a luxury.
Production matters, but production alone cannot tell us what people are actually eating on a daily basis in 2026, how food reaches them, or who captures the lion’s share of profits.
This is why the public conversation has to move from “agriculture” to food systems. A food system is everything involved in feeding society: land, water, seed, farming, policy, fishing, pollinators, hunting, processing, political tensions, transportation, history, markets, culture, vendors, supermarkets, school meals, household labour, cooking, waste and even public health. Once we use this wider conceptual frame, the measure of success is no longer how many tonnes of rice or sugar were produced. It becomes whether food is affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate, and environmentally sustainable – none of which a production figure can answer.
One of those criteria is worth pausing on, because it is where the Long Creek reporting has concentrated: claims about the clearing of previously forested land and the reshaping of waterways, though the precise acreage and the history of the parcels remain disputed. What environmental standards should apply when pristine land is converted to intensive agricultural use, regardless of who owns it? Guyana does not currently have a good answer, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent screening decisions for agricultural projects do not supply one. That is an argument for another day. What matters here is that it is a question about the food system, and the production figures the government prefers to cite cannot raise it.
The same is true of the question underneath it: not what a farm produces, but who decided it would exist. Food security asks whether people have reliable access to enough safe, nutritious food, without asking much about where it came from or how it was produced. The right to food sharpens the issue and builds on the preexisting international human rights legislation outlined by the United Nations. It means that the State is obligated to ensure that its citizenry has regular access to food that is sufficient, safe, affordable, nutritious, and culturally acceptable. In Guyana’s case, Article 40:1 of the Constitution explicitly recognizes the right to food. It does not require that the government must provide handouts. It means that national food policymaking must create conditions in which people can feed themselves with dignity.
Using the conceptual lens of Food sovereignty, we can ask further questions: who holds the power to shape the system? Who owns the land? Who controls seed and technology? Which producers and communities receive institutional support, and on what basis? What foods are prioritized? Whose knowledge counts as expertise? Applied to Long Creek, the question of who owns that industrial farm is compounded by how decisions of that kind are made: what land becomes what and who takes part in deciding.
These are not abstract questions. Put directly to the government they get specific very quickly, and specific questions shape what a ministry learns to see. How does the Ministry of Agriculture’s support to large Brazilian investors compare with its support to small producers in Sophia? On what criteria are recipients of the livestock breeding programme selected? What proportion of Region 9’s school feeding produce is bought from village farmers? Were vendors properly consulted before the Parika and Stabroek market redevelopment plans were settled? Can a family actually afford the healthy Guyanese diet set out in the Ministry of Health’s own recipe book? What are the wages and working conditions of the women employed at the Tacama megafarm? Are Indigenous communities giving free, prior and informed consent before agricultural projects reach their territories and waterways?
None of these are anti-development questions. They are the ordinary questions of anyone serious about food policy.
The debate about the President’s farm will likely stay where it is, on disclosure, financing and political accountability. Those issues deserve answers. But the farm has also opened space for a more demanding conversation, and we should use it. The place to begin is with the assumption that more production automatically means greater food security. It does not. The two are not the same thing.
Guyana needs to improve access to the food system it already has. It also needs to decide what kind of food system it wants. Discussing food security is an important first step. It is not the whole conversation.
Discussion