Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 14, 2015 Editorial
Many things have conspired to deal Guyana some unfortunate hands. These things have thwarted its drive for development. It is not that the same thing is not true for other countries but it is particularly harsh for Guyana because its people rely on one thing when that thing proves to be successful.
From the time the first rice cultivation started in Guyana among the slaves, there has been no effort to do more than sell rice as a primary product. Millers found it extremely lucrative to sell rice as a milled commodity rather than to expand to market it as value product.
Different situations caused Guyana to produce different volumes of rice. When technology was not so ubiquitous—when planting and reaping was done manually and with the use of animals volumes were nowhere as large as they are today. For certain, farmers could not cultivate the huge acres that they do today.
With technology came expansion. Newer yields also boosted production but in the face of the growing production, now somewhere close to 600,000 tonnes, there continued to be efforts to produce even more of rice as a primary product.
Global conditions dictate that forever rice would be needed in various quarters of the world, especially in the face of increasing conditions of drought and famine. However, there are many rice producing countries in the world and some of these actually subscribe to the global stockpile to aid countries hit by disasters.
But most of these countries have long moved on to value added. In fact, some of their largest markets are to countries that demand rice to make cereals and other condiments. Trinidad does not grow rice but it surely makes money from rice products. One popular product, Rice Crispies, is imported into Guyana which produces rice.
Given that Guyana produces rice one would have expected a multitude of rice products including the Rice Crispies.
Guyana, given its colonial, has been unable to wean itself from wheat flour. During the days of the import restrictions, when Guyana could not afford to pay for certain imports, particularly the luxury items, the then government introduced what it called import substitution. Of course there was some good out of that because local products replaced the imported items.
A local salted fish industry grew up as did a thriving vegetable crop industry. The inadequacy of electricity thwarted a canning industry but many things emerged and all of them are here to stay. Guyana no longer imports salted cod and for sure, ground provision has caused the potato to all but disappear.
Rice flour emerged but because it was not as easily manipulated as the imported wheat flour people did not try to maximize its use. So it was that Guyana merely concentrated on rice as a grain. Today, the failure to diversify in the rice industry has left farmers and millers with little option but to hope that new markets are secured.
Venezuela which until recently accounted for some 30 per cent of Guyana’s rice opted to halt imports in a fit of pique. Needless to say, there would be a large quantity of rice on our hands, rice that would be too much for us to consume.
And given the quality of storage, within three months hundreds of tons of the product would be spoilt. There is a stockfeed industry that uses other rice by-products so it would be a waste of good rice to divert the excess to the stockfeed industry.
However, such incidents as has now happened should serve as a wakeup call to our rice producers. It is about time they begin looking at other products that would not only make the rice more profitable to cultivate by way of the value added, but it would surely compensate for whatever surplus there might be.
At the same time one cannot help but notice that the value added product would have a longer shelf life than the rice itself. It is time rice millers begin to look toward diversification.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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