As there is no clear indication up to this time as to when there will be a measure of respite from the COVID-19 pandemic, the constraints that continue to harness the business sector are growing increasingly worrying. The uncertainties that affect, to varying degrees, all business sectors have implications for livelihoods and by extension, for the well-being of families.
Stabroek Business does not claim to have a macrocosmic, universal insight into the extent to which the various sectors have been thriving, in what has now become a position of certain uncertainty. As far as the challenges facing the business community are concerned, our focus has been primarily on the small business sector, primarily agriculture, agro-processing, and some of the large and small businesses in the retail trade and other aspects of the services. sector.
We know from first hand knowledge that some of the smaller businesses, many in the agro-processing sector, have folded in the sense that some of the owners have devoted their substantial activities and are now pursuing alternative methods of supporting their families. Small farmers have also been afflicted with loss of labor support and in some cases weakening farm-to-market logistics; so that their normal operations have effectively come to an end.
What is also true is that there has been no arrangement to talk about it so far, designed to bring any meaningful measure of relief to the small business sector as a whole. We have witnessed the 2021 budget presentation and $ 250 million allocation to the Bureau of Small Businesses, an amount, when taken into account of the Bureau’s significant mission, relatively speaking, is ‘chump change’. More to the point, it’s no secret that only a handful of the huge number of our local small business ‘bushfires’ are registered with the Bureau so that most enterprises won’t benefit from the little that the Bureau has to offer.
Of course, there is no ‘contingency’ for those small business hurdles wedged between the rock of COVID-19 and the ‘hard place’ of a decisive shortage of state support, the point here being is something like the more a meaningful ‘rescue’ package emerges, the greater the likelihood that many, perhaps most of those small businesses that had promised growth in the run up to COVID -19, now bending forever.
In retrospect, the government’s failure to implement the 20% allocation of state contracts to small businesses when the opportunity arose to do so now could mean the difference between survival and ‘going under’ for many of those small businesses . Once it became known that the 20% allocation was likely to begin, too much deviation and improvement occurred. Although it seems that some understandable procedural issues are likely to stand in the way of implementing this provision, incorporated by hand, in the Small Business Act 2004, one cannot help thinking that those might have been imposed over time when consideration is taken, in retrospect. what we have lost in potential small business earnings since then. It will be interesting to see how soon the provision is implemented following the recent legislative amendment.
Insofar as the full and effective implementation of the 20% small business allocation is concerned, one feels that, in the circumstances, outside of SBB’s ‘paltry’ $ 250 million allocation, there is little if any entirely in the national budget for the small business sector. . The current administration should have already been moving towards full and effective implementation of that specific clause in the Small Business Act. If it can move reasonably quickly, within the confines of the provisions of the Small Business Act then it is unlikely to be able to salvage some of those sections of the micro and small business sector that have not yet been sucked in by the addiction resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. If this does not happen then the micro and small business sector, as a whole, is likely to find itself hiding nowhere.
We have already pointed out in previous editors that much of the dilemma facing small and small businesses has to do with the fact that they do not benefit from no continued representation from mainstream Business Support Organizations. Contextually, one may well wonder whether small and small businesses would not have done better under the provisions of the 2021 budget if its concerns had benefited from some sound lobby designed to ensure that at least some of the its concerns are met outside the SBB framework.
The occasional ‘noises’ made by some BSOs focused on micro and small business concerns are still a small voice in a deserts desert. As stated in previous editors, the mainstream BSOs have their own ‘fish to fry’, which has to do primarily with locating their members to benefit from the Local Content spin-off of oil activities and the country’s gas.
Conversations with mainstream business individuals, members of the mainstream BSOs, do not leave the impression that these have a sense of a wider private sector that extends to the agro-processing operation run from a domestic kitchen or a small community canteen that could rely for its survival on no more than a handful of regular customers and the proceeds from these enterprises pay the family-supporting wages.
The reality is that introducing oil and gas considerations into the local economic equation seems to have broadened our existing layers of business and drawn an even sharper line than previously existed between the homepage and those not identified. A crisis may well be on the horizon since then, where developments such as those arising from the advent of oil and gas widen the gap between ‘rich and poor’ in the business sector, then the stronger impact that gap will have across wider society. it could lead to serious and potentially unstable challenges for those in control.