Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 16, 2009 Editorial
The rice farmers in Region 2 are up in arms once again. Their gripe this time is the price the millers are offering them for their paddy. They complain that at $2500 per bag, their cost of producing the paddy would not even be covered and most of them could end up literally losing their shirts.
Region 2 is always a harbinger of what the rice farmers in the rest of the country can expect as they begin to reap their crop a bit later: it would appear that for the umpteenth time, the rice industry is in trouble.
The situation becomes even grimmer when one factors in the well-publicised situation where many of these farmers have not been paid for their paddy from the last crop. This would mean that farmers, most of whom are struggling to provide for their families from plots of less that ten acres each, had dug into their savings – or most likely, taken out loans at exorbitant interest – and have reached the end of their tether. This is not just a tragedy for rice farmers – it is a tragedy for all Guyana. With the sugar, bauxite and forestry sectors enmeshed with their own travails we cannot afford to let matters simply play out.
In the developed countries, the acolytes of “free-market fundamentalism” have suddenly discovered the principle of “too big to fail”. As their entire economies appeared about to be sucked into the black hole created by the collapse of their vaunted financial system, it was decided that the “hands-off” stricture against governmental intervention had to go. Billions – even possibly trillions – of dollars were deployed to prop up industries that were deemed capable of bringing down the whole edifice if they were allowed to collapse. A new-found concern for the millions that were thrown out of jobs was also proffered as the reason for the massive injections of cash.
Recently, President Jagdeo alluded to the prescience of Dr Jagan in deciding, way back in 1993, that for us, GuySuCo was “too big to fail.” That point of view was, of course, diametrically opposed by the then ruling orthodoxy pushed by the Washington Consensus of the IMF/World Bank but Dr Jagan stood firm and has now been vindicated. We have now reached another “Jagan moment”.
The rice industry is important for all of us not just because it is the largest employer in our country but because of its strategic importance in a world where “food security” has risen to the top of the global agenda – just behind, possibly, “energy security.
Guyana’s possession of the institutional memory to produce wet rice in the western hemisphere is too valuable a resource to lose. The official opening of the Takutu Bridge should remind all of us, including the policy makers, of the demand for rice in northern Brazil that can be satisfied by us if we can stay the course. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
We have been convinced by the powers that be (read IMF/World Bank) that in the “liberalised” dispensation into which we were inducted, the price of our rice must be determined totally by the “market”. And because we have faithfully followed the script, our farmers (via the chain of millers to exporters) have been riding the roller coaster of the world-market price fluctuations for rice (of which they have absolutely no control) ever since. However, way before the developed world’s bold and open acceptance of the “too big to fail” principle, they had already introduced a principle to guarantee their “food security”: governmental guaranteed base-line prices for grains. US farmers, for instance, could never lose their shirts because of low “world market prices”.
What we are proposing is that the government work with all stakeholders in the industry – and the banks that we are subsidising by sterilising billions of the dollars they refuse to lend to entrepreneurs – to devise a price support system for our rice farmers, in line with the ones the new converts to the “too big to fail” principle have been using all along.
Jagdeo giving Exxon 102 cent to collect 2 cent.
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