If Essequibo rice farmers are not even close to walking away from an industry that has served them well for decades, there are signs of an increasing awareness of some of the current uncertainties associated with the sector.
For some time now, there has been a measure of uneasiness in the rice sector in Essequibo mostly over payments to farmers for paddy sold to the millers. Our own less than expert observation is that the problem could stay with the sector for some time.
More rice is being produced from one year to the next (the Guyana Rice Development Board says that some 50,000 additional tonnes of rice will be produced this year) and that means that there will be more paddy to be stored and more rice to be sold than in previous years.
More than that, the advent of the lucrative PetroCaribe Agreement with Venezuela had created a distinct buzz across the Cinderella County’s farming belt and by the farmers own admission significantly raised hopes for the future of investment in the sector.
Outside of PetroCaribe, however, there is still more rice to be sold on what is a highly competitive market. Up to last week some Essequibo farmers and millers were fretting over the fact that harvesting season for the second crop has come around with a fair amount of the first crop’s yield still lying in silos; some of it still unpaid for.
For the farmers, cash flow issues are not without implications for their ability to meet their own financial obligations, which can include meeting loan repayments to commercial banks as well as the costs of fertilizer and spares for farming equipment.
Conversations with farmers and millers alike suggest that the uncertainties over what is happening in the rice sector will not go away easily and the farmers themselves are beginning to show signs of wanting to protect themselves more against the vagaries of the sector.
Trust, incidentally, may well be one of the issues between farmers and millers. Not every farmer, for example, buys the millers’ stories about bulging silos and an inability to pay for paddy. Perhaps oddly enough, however, these are issues that are considered internal to the rice community in Essequibo so that they rarely seem to get out of hand.
What cannot be denied, though, is that the farmers are showing an increasing inclination to hedge their bets, to embark on excursions into diversification that range from income-subsidizing kitchen gardens to more ambitious investments in cash crop farming and cattle rearing. Some farmers talk about having to periodically slaughter and sell a few head of cattle to meet outstanding payments on equipment parts and fertilizer while a few have long taken the plunge into even greater levels of diversification entirely outside of the agricultural sector.
It is not, they insist, a matter of having lost faith in rice but purely a matter of having come to terms with the transformation that has swept the industry over the years and wanting to protect themselves against its worst excesses.
Some of those Essequibo farmers whose families have already been in the rice business say too that they are looking nervously over their shoulders at their children who have had access to tertiary and university education and who are demonstrating a healthy measure of indifference to sustaining the family tradition. Rice, they say, may still be a major money earner (and employer) for families on the Essequibo Coast but in circumstances where challenges in the sector require their attention, contemplation and even a considerable measure of change, it would be foolhardy to look the other way.
