To appreciate the national significance of the country’s most high profile rice milling company, Nand Persaud & Company Ltd. You have to cast your mind over the journey that the company has made from a one-tonne per hour rice mill at No. 36 Village, Corentyne, to what it is today, an institution in local rice farming and a company that has done well enough to begin to look outside of itself, to the growth and development of the wider rice industry.
When the company’s serving Chief Executive Officer Mahindra Persaud agreed to talk to us a few weeks ago, we travelled to the No. 36 Village establishment. A queue of more than sixty trucks laden with paddy was waiting to be processed and paid. Some of them had overnighted. They didn’t mind. Nand Persaud & Company is one of just a few local rice milling operations that pay the farmers upon delivery of the paddy.