…rice markets
Your Eyewitness isn’t in the “blame game” business. There’s no percentage in that. He figures we’re all in the same boat and there’s no point in drilling hole in the hull. We’ll all be going down, won’t we? So let’s talk about our Venezuelan markets for rice that might just disappear come November – without pointing fingers.
Back when Jagdeo was President, the rice farmers were “up the creek” without the proverbial paddle, as prices plunged below production costs. What was interesting was that even though the industry had been “privatised”, the marketing of the rice and paddy was still, by and large, left up to the government.
For some reason that’s never been fully explained, private exporters – such as abound in neighbouring Suriname – never stepped up to the crease here.
Someone should investigate whether the “co-op experiment” that had rice as one of its major planks, killed initiative or know-how in rice marketing.
Anyhow up comes Jagdeo, who runs into President Chavez of Venezuela at a Climate Change parley in – of all places – the U.S. in 2009. Being a fella who’s always on the lookout for Guyana, he suggests to Chavez that maybe Venezuela could buy rice from Guyana. And a deal was born.
Rice farmers sang hosannas to Jagdeo as the price of paddy rose immediately when 50,000 tonnes of rice were shipped to Venezuela. How quickly they forget, eh? This figure jumped to the 200,000+ tonnes last year. The deal became even sweeter when it was negotiated that payments for oil shipped from Venezuela – under the 2007 PetroCaribe facility could be written off against rice shipments. Guyana was thus spared finding hundreds of millions in foreign currency for oil, by paying for it in Guyana dollars, which it could simply print!
And who conceptualised and negotiated all of this? Not Jagdeo, right? Wrong! But you wouldn’t hear anything about this, will you? But, like they say, as the world turns, things change. Venezuelans are still eating the same amount of rice – more as the population rises. They’re still smuggling 200,000 tonnes of their own rice production – at a premium price – to Columbia.
They’ve still cut back their purchases from the U.S. by 200,000 tonnes. And they still have rice shortages.
So why are they threatening to cancel our rice-for-oil deal? Well, like we said in the beginning…we’re not pointing fingers…but maybe some diplomatic lapse?
We’re waiting for those rice farmers in Essequibo – who’d been marching up and down the road in various stages of undress against the PPP – to raise their index fingers!!

…the movie experience
Don’t ever let it be said your Eyewitness doesn’t have his kinder, gentler side. Last week, he took his kids to the movies at the new Giftland Mall. Not all altruism, mind you: he hoped to wean them off Roosevelt Field Mall, over in Long Island. Which not so incidentally also has its multiplex. So he arrived at the now famous “road to the mall” and espied the long awaited edifice. Not bad…lots of glass and glitz.
He’d seen the grand opening on TV and wondered where was Jagdeo.
Your Eyewitness remembered the stitch Jagdeo had taken when, after leasing the land to Giftland in 2007, building didn’t even start for years. But this was only one of the transformational mega projects he believed in. But the cinemas were great…his kids schlepped off to see “Inside Out” and he and the missus checked out the latest Terminator.
Imagine Arnold gets to look like when he’d just hitched up with that Kennedy girl! Even kids teared up at the pixelated 3-D images.
And the popcorn was free!!

…space and time
The world’s celebrating that it’s100 years since Einstein unveiled his Special Theory of Relativity!! And 99.9999% of us still can’t get it that gravity can slow down time.
But at least as he gets older, your Eyewitness appreciates that time is relative!