By no means a big player’ in the global rice industry, Guyana continues to be self-sufficient in what is one of the world’s most strategically important food commodities. Setting that aside, the country’s rice sector continues to enjoy lucrative markets in the Caribbean and further afield in the hemisphere.
The sense of stability that informs the pursuits of the rice industry here in Guyana is a far cry from the sense of jitteriness that comes across in reporting on the sector, globally. There are valid reasons for this. The most recent international reports on the rice industry published recently points to unease insofar as the gap between rice production and demand is concerned. Two factors, particularly, influence that circumstance. The first is that the governments of the ‘big players’ in the global rice industry, including India, China and Vietnam, must balance their rice exports against the food needs of their own, already large and continually growing populations. India ranks second, behind China among the ‘heavy hitters’ in the global rice industry and its recent partial ban on exports by roughly a fifth, may well have significantly accentuated threat levels insofar as global food security is concerned, having regard to Russia’s earlier cessation of an agreement that allowed Ukraine to export wheat.
