On any given morning, traffic in Guatemala City is a silent chaos: cars crawl forward at a snail’s pace, horns sound like a collective lament, and time is lost in the air. It is a perfect metaphor for our productivity: we are moving, but we are not getting anywhere. Two weeks ago, we spoke about how Guatemala fell from 24th place to 108th in GDP per capita, about how South Korea and Singapore left us behind while we clung to the comfort of the status quo. But why are we still trapped? What is preventing us from taking the leap?
Look at agriculture, the soul of this land. We export coffee ($1.2 billion), bananas ($900 million), sugar ($700 million), palm oil ($600 million), and cardamom ($300 million), the latter as the world’s largest exporter, a source of pride that springs from Alta Verapaz (OEC 2022). It is green gold, but we send it abroad raw and cheap, as if it were firewood. What if cocoa became high-end chocolate, cardamom became essence for perfumes, sugar became rum or ethanol, bananas became flour for the world, coffee became capsules for the planet’s mornings? A processing plant would triple the value per pound —from $1.4 to $4.5 for coffee, for example—, put food on thousands of tables, and pull us out of the commodities trap. With drones, irrigation, intelligent automation, and a little ingenuity, TFP (Total Factor Productivity) would rise and climate risks would shrink. Nestlé and Givaudan, giants in flavors and fragrances, are already looking at us. What are we waiting for to open the door to them? And what would happen if we also brought L’Oréal to the table?
And it does not stop there. Off our Pacific coast lies a school of tuna that fishermen know is immense, a treasure that inspired theses and built ports like Quetzal, yet one we continue to let escape. Shrimp ($150 million) could become skewers or tilapia caviar; fruits and vegetables such as blueberries and green beans ($400 million) could become juices or frozen products for American supermarkets. Every piece of land and sea cries out for factories, for free zones like those in Ireland (12.5% corporate tax) or Georgia (15%), which attract capital while we charge 25% and scare away investors. But the government does not push forward. Without capacity and a government plan, how can we move faster?
Guatemala does not need to invent the path, only to walk it. Imagine a country where cardamom perfumes Paris, cocoa sweetens New York, and tuna reaches Tokyo. Where banks water dreams and young people program the future.
The money is there, ready to flow. If banks released credit as Panama does (106% of GDP), if a Guatemalan Agroindustrial Exchange offered coffee or tuna futures like Brazil does with sugar, if we sold green bonds for factories and agricultural insurance against storms and pests, agricultural cycles would no longer keep us on our knees. But without roads or ports, gold gathers mold. In Alta Verapaz, cradle of cardamom and palm oil, Panzós and its neighboring towns drown 97% of their people in poverty. A four-lane highway to Teculután —60 minutes instead of four and a half hours— and a superport linking Puerto Barrios and Santo Tomás, less than two hours away, would open the world to those harvests. Puerto Quetzal, with $600 million from the United States to expand through 2027, could become the other end of the thread. It is not only about execution; it is about vision.
But nothing ignites without people to make it work. SENACYT, with its tiny 0.03% of GDP invested in R&D (Research and Development), is a joke compared to Costa Rica (0.7%). If the government does not invest in secondary education, the private sector or civil society could create an INTECAP 2.0: a national institute that takes young people out of primary school and turns them into technicians in agroindustry, finance, English, and HTML. For $50 million per year, in five years we would have the hands and minds needed for factories and exports. TFP (Total Factor Productivity) could climb to 0.75 within a decade.
This is not an impossible dream. Mauritius turned sugarcane into rum and surpassed the United States in TFP (Total Factor Productivity). Costa Rica modernized its agriculture and left us behind. We have the land, the sea, the determination. Exports worth $18 billion (17% of GDP, AGEXPORT 2023) could become $25 billion within ten years with factories and vision. But we remain slow, afraid of change. Without global pressure, there is no fire. Without fire, there is no tomorrow.
Guatemala does not need to invent the path, only to walk it. Imagine a country where cardamom perfumes Paris, cocoa sweetens New York, and tuna reaches Tokyo. Where banks water dreams and young people program the future. The gold lies beneath the earth and the sea, in our hands and minds. The moment is not tomorrow. It is now.
