The twenty or so farmers who had assembled in a storage bond at Land of Plenty belonging to rice miller Ramesh Ramotar had done so at the invitation of the miller. A representative of the Guyana Rice Producers Association. (GRPA) was also present at the meeting.
The whole idea of the meeting was to try to talk through what appeared to be an impending emergency in the rice sector on the Essequibo Coast. Ramotar wanted to make the point to the farmers that with this year’s second crop currently in the process of being reaped, his silos were still filled with around 900 tons of paddy from the previous crop. He wanted the farmers to know that he was out of storage capacity. Some of the farmers appeared anxious and turned to the man from the GRPA, Dharamkumar Seeraj. They wanted assurances that the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) would be redoubling its efforts to sell more rice abroad so that the silos could be emptied to make way for the current crop. This is part of what lies at the heart of the present uneasiness in the rice community in Essequibo.
Afterwards, the farmers talked among themselves about just how filled the rice silos on the Essequibo were anyway. Some surmised that talk about packed silos was simply
