One of the country’s leading rice millers and exporters of rice has told the Stabroek Business that it is indeed unacceptable that an amount of the magnitude alluded to in a recent official media release should be owing to local rice farmers for rice sold to Panama up to two years ago, and has asserted that it is the responsibility of the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) to actively pursue the matter of settlement of the debt with the Panamanian authorities.
On Sunday, an official media release disclosed that the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs had dispatched a letter to the “Panamanian authorities” urging them to honour their obligations to Guyana and to pay the $1.9 billion owed to local rice millers. Asked to comment on the disclosure, Chief Executive Officer of the Berbice rice milling operation, Nand Persaud and Company, Mahendra Persaud, told Stabroek Business that official pressure for the payment of the outstanding amounts was overdue and that it was fitting that the matter was being pursued through official channels. Persaud said that while it was the millers to whom the amounts were owing, there existed no bilateral agreement between those millers and the Panamanian buyers. In fact, he said, it was to the GRDB that the local farmers sold the rice that was shipped to Panama. Accordingly, Persaud told the Stabroek Business that it was to the GRDB that the millers were looking to expedite the payments.
A release from the Department of Public Information (DPI) late last week stated that Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha had confirmed in an interview that Panama had acknowledged the debt and is committed to paying. Government, the DPI statement said, “continues to take urgent steps to retrieve the outstanding sums.” Mustapha is further quoted in the DPI statement as saying that the Panamanian debtors had expressed a desire to have the contract with the GRDB continue into the next year and are awaiting the end of this pandemic to effect the outstanding payment. He is also quoted in the release as saying that he will be contacting Panama’s Minister of Agriculture in the new week, to fix a date for the money to be released.
While the current Minister of Agriculture is quoted in the DPI release as saying that the matter “could have been resolved a long time ago, had the previous administration “shown some interest” in the concerns of rice farmers, it is no secret that the problem of outstanding payments for rice sold by local farmers and millers is a historic one.
Last week, the Nand Persaud & Company CEO told the Stabroek Business that amounts were also long overdue from sales of rice to Cuba arising out of a 2017 deal with Cuba, the first such bilateral rice deal with that country in forty years. The Agreement was concluded with the Cuban state agency, ALIMPORT, which is responsible for some categories of imports. As in the instance of the Panama circumstance, negotiations with regard to payment are being ‘fronted’ by the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
