The Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) has expressed confidence that rice production this year would be “excellent” despite the novel coronavirus pandemic fallout and assures that that there will be adequate supplies for local, regional, and extra-regional markets.
According to a Department of Public Information (DPI) release, GRDB’s General Manager, Nizam Hassan, expressed this confidence yesterday while stating that all quality assurance services continue to operate as usual since rice exportation is ongoing.
“We don’t expect that there will be any fallbacks from our projections, and for this year just as we had done last year, we expect that we will get over 1 million tonnes of paddy, which will be equivalent to approximately 700,000 tonnes rice.
“We have already harvested over 50 per cent of the crop, and the yields are just over 6 tonnes per hectare, a point one per cent more than Guyana’s national average in 2019,” Hassan disclosed.
The General Manager also noted that due to the current disease outbreak globally, there have been setbacks in exporting rice to some European countries including Italy and France. But thankfully, that has been offset by a 40 per cent increase in exports to Latin American countries.
“This was primarily because of the jump in our exports to Venezuela,” he explained, adding, “While there have been fallouts in some of the markets and some of it is linked to COVID-19, other markets are relatively stable.”
GRDB has since implemented several measures to assist in stopping the spread of the virus.
Rice millers and exporters are encouraged to inform GRDB a few days in advance about the processing of their documents and experiments at the Burma Rice Research Station are closing off since the crop is at the harvesting stage and most of the work currently ongoing is data gathered to be analysed. In addition, the agency’s extension services continue to operate strictly on an on-call and rotational basis.
Extension officers liaise with farmers as the need arises, to obtain harvesting data, monitor for paddy bugs and advise farmers accordingly.
In what has now become ubiquitous in both the commercial and corporate sector, hand sanitisers have also been placed at entry points to the GRDB’s offices along with the World Health Organization’s advisories that are displayed in strategic locations so as to be easily visible to both staff and visitors, the release added.
