The PPP is cashing in on the preferential conditions of the PetroCaribe deal for personal reasons

DEAR EDITOR,
In the Kaieteur News of Tuesday 5th August 2014 there is an article captioned “Agriculture Ministry eying higher priced markets for rice as production keeps climbing”. This looks innocent enough, but is it an attempt to deceive the rice farmers that there can be a solution for them to keep producing at un-competitively high prices.
The PPP just doesn’t seem to care, it’s very strange, it is incompetent to give good national production results, especially in agriculture, so it deceives farmers that all is well, to keep them producing and let the cards fall where they may.
The Skeldon sugar cane farmers are a good example, mostly they are all bankrupt, and now Uitvlugt is giving land for farmers to cultivate cane when GuySuCo cannot do it themselves due to numerous constraints. The PPP continues to deceive its own supporters into taking risks, simply to show more production, and if the farmers go bankrupt it’s okay. I just don’t understand it, and the farmers keep falling for these shenanigans over and over again – blindly following a set of totally immoral people.
Agriculture Minister Ramsammy misleads us by telling us of the huge challenges the PPP has had to overcome to achieve the overwhelming success of the rice industry, but the real situation may be completely different.
The PetroCaribe deal was initiated by Hugo Chavez to buy support from his Caribbean neighbours. To buy this support, he began selling the 14 countries which signed the deal, including Guyana, gasoline and oil from Venezuela under preferential conditions, which would make them indebted to him and therefore support him whatever he may decide to do there.
The Guyana Chronicle of 7th August 2014 tells us that Donald Ramotar, as head of the Government of Guyana, officially commissioned the Hugo Chavez Centre for Rehabilitation and Reintegration, a facility for homeless persons in West Berbice which has received extensive funding from the Government of Venezuela through PetroCaribe.
Chavez nationalised foreign and local assets, including the US’s. He all but destroyed the economy of Venezuela before he died. He violated the human rights of countless numbers of his citizens and his plan worked, since we have said nothing in criticism of him; in fact we are now honouring him.
Venezuela is an OPEC nation and they cannot sell the fuel at less than the internationally agreed prices of OPEC, so Chavez put in place a system where he can bribe his neighbours to support him, by giving them the oil at the OPEC prices, but with massive concessions.
We don’t know exactly what the concessions for Guyana are, but they can be substantial. I extracted the following from the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper – that country also being a signatory of PetroCaribe.
“The PetroCaribe programme, an agreement between Venezuela and some Caribbean territories to purchase oil on preferential terms, allows the Government of Jamaica to convert 40 per cent of fuel payments annually to a loan repayable over 25 years at 1% interest.
The funds flowing from the arrangement are managed by the PetroCaribe Development Fund [PDF] which earns from loans packaged for the public sector and from investment returns.” And the fund is huge, amounting to date of a loan portfolio of J$206 billion.
There is no such arrangement we know of in Guyana, but we know that the Government of Guyana [GoG] brings in the fuel/oil from Venezuela through the GEA and sells it to the local gas stations and GPL at full price, but since they are only required to pay 60%, if the GoG is taking advantage of this preferential arrangement and are only paying 60% of the total cost of the fuel whilst selling to the local gas stations at the full price, where does the 40% collected from the gas stations and private users go?
If what is visible in this matter is true, this has the capacity to make the lotto funds fraud a joke in comparison. Our annual fuel bill is US$350 million, 40% would represent $140 million or G$28 billion per year!
We know that there is an agreement this year to exchange rice and paddy for the fuel and oil payments – 150,000 tonnes of paddy and 50,000 tonnes of rice – but we don’t know anything about the actual arrangement. How much for example are we getting for this rice and how does that compare with the world market price?
We did see a protest by farmers that the cost of transporting their paddy and rice to Venezuela was exceptionally high, so the governing party may be robbing the farmers by overcharging them for shipping. Could they also be paying the farmers less than what Venezuela is buying the rice and paddy for? But more than the world market price?
A glimpse of this explosion that is to come is already evident with the protests and picketing of the rice farmers in the Essequibo and other areas, with the Minister of Agriculture telling us in the Kaieteur News of 5th August 2014 that he is having difficulty finding markets for our paddy since the cost of production is high. He is even signaling that they must “remain viable and resilient despite the challenges”.
He has done nothing about implementing a market strategy with stable prices so that the local price for paddy remains stable throughout the year. Unless this happens soon, a lot of farmers and millers will continue to get hurt. Raising the question: shouldn’t the extra profits from the rice and paddy preferential price, go towards making the rice industry more efficient rather than doing the easy and dangerous thing of paying an artificially high price for the Guyana production sold to Venezuela?
The Government can embark on a process of precision land leveling, more efficient roadways to bring the paddy out of the cultivation (which is the biggest problem farmers have today), better drainage and irrigation facilities, better agronomic practices to up Guyana’s rice yields which are low by international standards etc.
And the shenanigans don’t end there. I have credible information from reliable sources that very senior members of the GRDB are approaching the manufacturers of agro chemicals abroad, and are asking that the chemicals be sold to them directly, not the GRDB but the executives of the GRDB, presumably with the intention of selling it to the GRDB then to the farmers.
Furthermore I do not subscribe to the view that this PPP government did very much for the rice farmers; the turnaround in rice was started by the Economic Recovery Programme [ERC] initiated by Desmond Hoyte, through a process of privatizing and liberalizing the industry, especially the privatization of the inefficient government mills. But there has to be some long term plan to protect the expansion of our rice industry which is not competitive – by the minister’s own admission – with the other world producers, especially Asia, at this time.
He is even suggesting that we mix the rice flour with the wheaten flour so that we can boost agro processing. Didn’t Burnham try that? A desperate Ramsammy is even proposing that they produce power from the paddy husk to power their milling operations and make briskets of compressed paddy shells to help GuySuCo to fire their boilers at the beginning of the grinding season.
It’s very carefully put, but it means that he is admitting that we are right; that the GuySuCo estates are not grinding at a rate which can accumulate bagasse and are buying a lot of wallaba wood to supplement their power generation. Is this how we will save the rice industry? With these pie in the sky, farcical, unworkable plans which will never materialise?
To sum up, our government may be on track to destroy the rice industry as they have done the sugar industry. All of the warning signs are there, and it now turns out that we may be as uncompetitive in rice as we are in sugar. It is showing, and we see this gem in the KN “the GRDB has developed 14 new varieties of rice which are cultivated by approximately 20 farmers!!” We have thousands of farmers and only 20 have the new varieties. It will take 25 years for the rest to get them.
The Economic Services Committee of the Guyana Parliament is well advised to find out everything it can about this PetroCaribe deal before it is too late, and we have as big a disaster in rice as we now have in sugar, and a debt which we can’t repay, since the PPP is cashing in on the preferential conditions of the PetroCaribe deal for personal reasons.

Tony Vieira