Prior to Minister Noel Holder’s intervention earlier this week to announce that the situation with regard to Guyana’s rice exports to neighbouring Venezuela was not as dire as had been initially thought, rice farmers, millers and the populace as a whole would have experienced some heart-stopping moments in the matter of the fate of huge volumes of rice that had already been consigned to Venezuela.
Two points should be made at this juncture. First we take the minister’s assertion that “Guyana had varied from its schedule of shipments by increasing the rate of rice shipments” and that “Guyana has been asked to revert to the agreed schedule” to be the substantive reason for the dissonance that had arisen in relation to the immediate future of rice shipments. This, presumably, is a circumstance that had arisen on the watch of the previous administration and it would not hurt if the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) which has (and had at the time) responsibility for ensuring the smooth movement of rice to Venezuela under the PetroCaribe Agreement, were to provide an explanation for what might have gone wrong.
Second, there was the announcement in the Ministry of Agriculture’s recent press release that “a high level team, inclusive of representatives from the Guyana Millers and Exporters Marketing Association is expected to visit the Spanish-speaking country shortly to discuss the way forward for the supply of commodities in exchange for oil under the PetroCaribe agreement” in the context of what now appears to be the shaky ground on which the six-year-old agreement reached under the late Hugo Chavez now stands.
It is hardly necessary for us to remind ourselves that the current brouhaha and what would appear to be Venezuela’s attempt to torpedo the PetroCaribe deal altogether coincides with Exxon’s recent oil find announcement. Venezuela is only too well aware of the importance of the PetroCaribe arrangement to Guyana’s rice industry and to the economy as a whole and it would by no means be unfair to say that its declaration that the existing rice exports arrangement would no longer be in place after November bears a curious resemblance of an act of economic sabotage.
How much hope we can realistically hold out that the negotiations that will arise out of the forthcoming visit by the Guyana team will be favourable is of course far from clear. We must assume that the local delegation will be aware that the bilateral talks with Caracas on “rice and other commodities as part of a revised agreement for 2016” cannot be isolated from the broader paradigm of the current status of Guyana/Venezuela relations, the current centrepiece of which is the new claim the Venezuela is making. More to the point, it should be noted that Guyana has already frowned upon Venezuela’s call to the UN for the appointment of a Good Officer, a circumstance that is unlikely to please Caracas. Put differently, we need to ask ourselves whether we can rely on a coherent and predictable engagement with Venezuela on the issue of the future of the rice deal in circumstances where there are other issues on the diplomatic table.
The whole affair is as much a body blow for our rice industry as it is a reminder that bilateral relations with Venezuela will always be conditioned by Caracas’ spurious territorial claims. A point of interest arising out of the discourses which this newspaper has had with persons on the subject of Venezuela’ latest tantrum has to do with what now appears to be a stronger national conviction that its territorial claim aside, Caracas is less than keen on seeing Guyana develop a strong economy. That perspective cannot be ruled out in the fashioning of our relations with our western neighbour in the future.
It should be made clear that the PetroCaribe Agreement brought a measure of economic benefit to Guyana and there can be no question of harking back to the various warnings issued by Washington and the International Monetary Fund, among others, about what they considered to be the vulnerabilities of the Agreement. Suffice it to say that the extant circumstances now challenge Guyana to broaden the base of its rice (and paddy) market as a means of being mindful of its economic security in circumstances where the presumed trust that had been built through the PetroCaribe Agreement over the past six years has, arguably, been irretrievably imperiled.
