Several months ago I went to the Island
of Leguan, and whilst there I met some rice farmers who were experiencing great
difficulty planting their rice because of the current high price of fuel and
the island which normally plants around 7000 acres of rice per crop is
currently only planting around 2000 acres.
After leaving Leguan and being
interested in the land as I am, I decided to find out, what, if anything has
been happening in the rice industry in this country over the past 20 years in
terms of increasing our productivity in the rice industry, since if the price
of fuel goes up the way it did and our rice industry collapsed almost
immediately then the foundation on which our industry is built is very brittle
indeed.
So I launched an investigation into
this matter, to determine what exactly the PPP have done for farmers since 1992,
what seminars they held to educate and inform the rice farmers to ensure that
modern techniques of agronomy and land preparation were being implemented by
the farmers, what scientific research is going on to improve the varieties of
rice we plant and whether these newer varieties were getting to the farmers, what
we did to reduce the high electrical and other costs of milling, what they did
to improve the yield of paddy per acre through the introduction of better water
control i.e. the productivity of the industry since the international
average of bags per acre is approaching 38-40 whilst we seem to be stuck at 25
bags per acre and our agronomic practices have essentially not changed since
the 1970's!
The answer is nothing was done!
If we are to compete with the modern
world we have to get better yields it is as simple as that! We don't need more
production by planting new marginal low yielding areas, we need to have better
agronomic/mechanical practices which will improve the yield per acre and
therefore increase the profitability per acre of the farmers. I found nothing
that even remotely approached a situation which would give a Guyanese rice
farmer the essential technical back up tools necessary to compete with
international markets, in fact what I found was a situation that would
guarantee that dooms our rice industry to extinction as competition increases
and globalisation becomes more and more a reality.
The transfer of technology to the
farmer, essential to improve the productivity of our industry seemed to be
completely absent, for example precision land levelling using laser guided land
preparation tools which has yielded huge dividends elsewhere was never used
here, even though Guysuco had such tools since the 1980's and knew that by simply
levelling the lands more precisely we can control the water level more
efficiently, get more uniform germination and ripening and improve yields up to
35%.
And I am not comparing what is taking
place in rich the developed nations like the US and the European Union here, I
am talking about information contained in "The Hindu" newspaper, the on line
edition of India's national newspaper dated Thursday February 21st
2002.
It says this and I quote it " a set of
new agronomic techniques and crop management strategies have raised the hope of
increasing the productivity of the crops in the Indo-Gangetic plains lying
between the Indian subcontinent and the foothills of the Himalayas" it
continues this way and I quote Dr. Jagdish Kumar Ladha soil nutritionist from
the International Rice Research Institute "the grain production here which
showed signs of stagnation and declining productivity since 1985, can be made
to rise and the farmers' income can go up, if they learn to be more efficient
in managing the precious natural resources and key inputs more judiciously" end
quote
What I have been telling you here are
the types of things that a vibrant and proactive Ministry of Agriculture should
be doing, at all times, to maximise yield in the local industry, I can
honestly report that I have not found any of these activities in my research
the only entity in the country at Burma conducting research into new varieties
seem to be a highly experimental installation and apparently none of what is
learnt there gets to the local farmers including any newer higher yielding
paddy varieties, and to me it seems that the poor rice farmers in this country
are practically on their own when it comes to maximising yields of paddy in
their fields, small scale peasant farmers, who make up the major portion of our
industry, are incapable of doing the sort of research and implementation of
technology I am talking about here, so we continue to get these low yields and
that is why the foundation of our rice industry is so brittle that any rise in
Fuel can decimate it as I saw happening in Leguan.
But we have to add a few
problems to the Guyana equation due to the incompetence and uncaring
attitude of our Ministry of Agriculture, which would not happen anywhere else
in the world in a major industry, and raises the question "are we serious about
helping our farmers get a better yield and earn more for themselves and for
their country?" The answer is again no! But let's examine some of these
problems, first on the list seems to be water availability; very few of the
rice growing areas seem to have an adequate availability of water when it is
needed. Precision land levelling is unheard of so water management is
completely unregulated and wasteful, our farmers seem to have to wait sometimes
as long as 3 months for fertilizer and currently there is only one fertilizer
supplier currently supplying the market, Amazon Chemicals which seemed to be
able to provide fertilizer on a timely basis to farmers has unfortunately gone
belly up, another business serving the Guyanese people well, which has succumbed
to Mr Jagdeo's poor management of the economy, there also seem to be an inadequate
supply of the chemicals needed to spray our rice fields for the numerous
insects that attack our crop annually resulting in lower yields, there is also
evidence that the chemicals to spray for blast was short earlier this year
affecting the crop just reaped; these are not complaints that any country
should have in its second biggest agricultural crop, the PPP talks glibly about
globalisation but we just cannot compete in this manner on a global scale.
For 30 years since Gavin Kennard left us
I do not consider that this country has had a proper Minister of Agriculture! Our
best man must go to the Ministry of Agriculture since it is on agriculture that
the major portion of our economy is built.
Diesoline is around 700 dollars per
gallon today and a Guyanese Farmer has to use about 8 gallons of diesel an acre
every crop, that's $5600 dollars an acre in fuel alone! and when he does
reap his field his earnings based on this ridiculous 25, 180 Lbs. bags of rice
Paddy per acre yield, he earns $37,500/acre so his cost in fuel alone to prepare
his field to get this low yield of 25 bags an acre amounts to 15% of his total crop
earnings, on the other hand if these same farmers had a yield closer to 40 bags
per acre which is the average in most other countries, then his total earnings
per acre per crop would be $60,000 and not $37,000 and his fuel costs would
only be 9.3% of his total earnings, as a result we would have a more solid
foundation for our rice industry which would be capable of competing with the
rest of the world. It is true that on the surface the PPP has increased rice
production since 1992 but the Bank of Guyana statistics tells us that in 1992
we produced 115 million tonnes for export, in 1996 it was 261,823 tonnes but by
2002 it has fallen back to 193,000 tonnes and it is still declining, so It did
go up, with the PPP pressing the millers to pay a better price per bag which
was not sustainable causing most of the rice industry to be plunged into financial
debt, but the foundation to support the expansion was just not there. The
farmers were coerced into increasing production alone to produce and plant more
low yielding lands and were left holding the wrong end of the stick, as usual!
