Dear Editor,
I agree with Mr Beni Sankar that something must be wrong because the rice price locally should not have climbed by so much in the past year.
Looking back at the El Nino phenomenon of 1998 some 45,000 acres which were cultivated for crop could not be sown. Of the 144,000 acres which were sown, between 10,000 to 15,000 acres were lost. Production of that first crop was estimated at 170,000 tonnes, some 30,000 tonnes were earmarked for the domestic market by the Minister of Agriculture, Hon Reepu Daman Persaud OR and he suggested ways to combat the domestic market crisis and the price for rice was stable then. Guyana has been producing rice for more than one hundred years. For this simple reason, rice is more than a staple for us, it has become a way of life.
The government cannot falter and allow the ordinary people to suffer a 100 percent price hike because the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) failed to monitor the local market. The Regional Co-ordinators of the Guyana Rice Development Board have a duty to collect information of stocks at each rice mill as well as rice leaving Guyana and could have prevented the price of rice on the local market from skyrocketing, if better monitoring had been done. In my tenure as a field officer with the RPA my job was to assist the GRDB to collect stock reports from the various mills and the Quailty Control Department was responsible for the improvement and maintenance of a high quality rice for the local and export markets.
There has been no natural disaster to the extent of the El Nino phenomenon causing the consumers to pay about $6,000 per gallon for the lowest quality of rice produced right here in Guyana.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan