Will the rice cereal factory really employ 200 workers?

Dear Editor,

The President of Guyana was at Anna Regina to turn the sod for the $100 million Rice Cereal factory and declared that it will create 200 jobs for Essequibians in the near future. Anyone who has experience and knowledge will know that one of the biggest rice complexes in Guyana on the Essequibo Coast does not employ that number of workers.

In the first place, this cereal factory will have to buy rice from private rice millers on the Essequiibo Coast, since government does not own a rice mill here. The farmers will still have to sell their paddy to the private rice millers, who will still hold the monopoly in terms of payment, grades, weight, dockage and moisture content.

At no time will this cereal factory be able to take the burden off the rice farmers’ backs and up the price for paddy. The biggest rice factory like Caricom Rice Mills at Anna Regina has the capacity to buy over a million bags of paddy with its silo, Aeroglide dryer, mechanical workshop, scale house, quality control departments, CP bond, new hess dryers, old field dryer, main cleaning plant, parboiling plant, time office, accounts departments, rice mills and rice bond, and it still has less than 200 employees.

The President and his advisors should tell us how they intend to hire these 200 employees on a full-time basis without all these departments that I mentioned for one of the biggest rice operations on the Essequibo Coast, Caricom Rice Mills Ltd. The only time I know about when this complex employed over 200 workers before the divestment in 1990, was with the Guyana Rice Board, under the previous government of Hugh Desmond Hoyte. I see this investment as a failure because the Essequibo Coast does not have a stable and reliable power supply; very often this coast is hit by sudden blackouts.

Prospects for this kind of Essequibo development are closely linked to the question of energy supplies. The government will have to make sure that the cereal complex has a big standby generation set to power the operations when there is a sudden power outage, just as the rest of the manufacturing sector here has.

The President promised Essequibians in his last term the Good Hope/Supenaam Irrigation   Project, whereby thousands of acres of new rice lands would be given to those who did not own a piece of rice land. This is now like Alice in Wonderland. Essequibians are a healthy, intelligent and literate people and no one can fool us. One of the burning questions among Essequibians is, who will own this cereal factory and pay the employees? Will it be GRDB, GRPA or the Ministry of Agriculture, and who will do the employing?

Yours faithfully,
(Name and address provided)