Dear Editor,
This should be a wake-up call for all rice millers who are selling rice on the local and international market and for them to be more careful when catching rice and sewing the rice bag from the dump scale.
The laboratory technician should take the blame for the carbon powder which was found in the army’s bag of rice. A laboratory technician’s job is to monitor the quality of rice being produced from the mill or dump scale, whether it’s local sales or for overseas markets. The Caricom standard was formulated in an effort to improve the quality of rice being produced and sold on the local and overseas market at each mill.
This is a weird case where millers would use gas tablets in bag rice. This is the first time I am hearing this, as a former rice bond clerk and laboratory technician working for decades at the government owned Guyana Rice Board (GRB). I have never seen gas tablets used in consumers rice. I know that the Rhyzopertha dominica is a serious pest stored in paddy, both larva and adult and are destructive and can make a very small crack in the husks and enter the grain.
Corcyra cephalonica is a rice moth, primarily a pest of milled rice containing a high percentage of broken grains. If proper sanitation and storage is neglected, lumps often occur inside the bag of rice. There are cases where I know that gas tablets are used in bulk paddy for fumigation purposes, but I never heard of it being used in rice especially in sewed bags of rice. The tablets would be placed in the paddy at several location or points in the bulk bond which is well sealed, then covered with a thick plastic. After some time, the gas will explore and kill all the paddy pests. Any fumigant which kills insects will also harm people, so millers have to be careful who they employ in their operation. This carbon powder placed in a brown paper bag into the sewn bag of consumer rice can very well be an inside job at the warehouse or at the dump scale. The miller needs to investigate which shift this rice was produced on and he can find the culprit.
I personally know Mr Ramesh Ramlakhan because I used to visit his mills and interact with him during my tenure with the RPA as a field officer. He is one of the youngest, soft spoken, honest and hardworking rice millers who rose to the top in the milling industry.
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Khan