Guyana and Venezuela are due to sign a new PetroCaribe Agreement by the end of the week, which is expected to allay fears in the rice sector.
“We are waiting on the swearing in of new ministers, which should be this week to sign the agreement,” Minister of Agriculture Dr Leslie Ramsammy told Stabroek News when asked about the agreement to export Guyanese rice for Venezuelan oil imports. He said the new pact would be for the “same volume, same price.”
Under the terms of the PetroCaribe Agreement, Guyana was to receive 5,200 barrels of oil on a daily basis while exporting 66 per cent of rice grown domestically.
When asked by Stabroek News if Guyana needed to expand export markets for rice so millers aren’t left with hundreds of thousands of tonnes of paddy stored, the minister stated that “we already supply to the Caribbean and Europe.”
He added that other countries have been shopping for Guyanese rice exports and currently “we are negotiating prices.”
He explained that “whilst I am negotiating, I am not going to let other producers know who I am talking to” and noted that once agreements were finalised, they would be publicised.
Guyana Rice Development Board General Manager Jagnarine Singh stated that mills across Guyana were filled with paddy that was not moving because of the lag in the PetroCaribe Agreement. He told Stabroek News that “we’ve seen exports increase to other countries and across the region, but not in the quantities that we [have] with the Venezuelan agreement.”
Singh added that 140,000 tonnes of paddy and 60,000 tonnes of white rice are annually exported to Venezuela. He said that the “original agreement is also 10 per cent more or less, so it could be 150,000 and 66,000” for paddy and white rice, respectively, this year.
He said that millers “currently have a lot of paddy and the mills have to store it,” while adding that unfortunately millers, for the most part, have exhausted their cash reserves while paying farmers for this first batch.
Singh told Stabroek News that the PetroCaribe Agreement was necessary for millers to start moving paddy along, allowing for cash reserves and overdraft to rebuild.
Rice farmers in the Essequibo region have been protesting since last Wednesday over the low prices being paid for paddy and many of them have noted that the situation may be driven by the still unsigned PetroCaribe Agreement.
Sham Narine, an Essequibo farmer, stated that “because the agreement with Venezuela not signed yet, mills don’t want to buy paddy for the prices and they have been saying the paddy not good.”
Narine had told Stabroek News that millers were using a paddy bug infestation as a scapegoat for not paying higher prices.
“They say that the bags full of damage [paddy] and so they can’t buy, but we think since Chavez died no one is sure if rice is going to Venezuela so the mills full up,” he said.
Other farmers have stated that they have to continue protesting because while the agreement is awaiting signatures, paddy still needs harvesting and they are still to be paid.
Rice production has been booming in Guyana within the last few years and many farmers have benefited from the high paddy prices.
The results allowed farmers to buy or rent additional land at significant prices, sometimes ranging from $34,000 to $45,000 per acre.
