A week after Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy publicly announced that the country’s rice industry had produced a record 300,000-tonne first crop for this year, Stabroek Business has learnt that many of the more than 1,500 rice farmers in Essequibo are displeased over the long-standing and seemingly insoluble problem of protracted payments for paddy delivered to the mills.
On Sunday, President of the Essequibo Paddy Association Naith Ram said members of the association were angry over the dichotomy between official boasting about the performance of the rice sector and failure to ensure that the rice farmers who had done so much to make that possible were not being compensated in a timely manner. Ram said he believed more should be done to help ensure that farmers benefit from an environment which would encourage them to produce more.
Ram told this newspaper that rice mills on the Essequibo coast have been persistently in breach of the Rice Factories Act of 1998,
