Shal­iza Has­sanali

Rice farm­ers held an emer­gency meet­ing on Fri­day to dis­cuss the fu­ture of the rice in­dus­try, which they claim was see­ing its fi­nal days be­cause of the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry's de­lay­ing tac­tics to in­crease pad­dy prices. Held in War­renville, the two-hour meet­ing at­tract­ed farm­ers from the Na­tion­al Rice Grow­ers Co-op­er­a­tive So­ci­ety Ltd (NRG), Caribbean Rice As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (CRATT) and Nar­i­va Farms Ltd (NFL) who called on Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Arnold Pig­gott to tell them if pad­dy (un­milled rice) pro­duc­tion had a vi­able fu­ture.

"We want min­is­ter Pig­gott to come clean with us. For al­most ten years our liveli­hood has been in lim­bo. We don't know where we stand. Why are they play­ing games with us?" asked Cratt chair­man Eniath Ho­sein. Ho­sein warned if they are not giv­en the price in­crease at the start of Feb­ru­ary's har­vest, this would bring an end to rice pro­duc­tion in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Tak­en for ride

"They would have to pack up and leave the fields. We can't con­tin­ue pro­duc­ing rice at the old rates. Our cost of pro­duc­tion is $1.40 per pound for pad­dy, while Na­tion­al Flour Mills is giv­ing us $1 per pound. It just does not make eco­nom­ic sense. The can­dle is cost­ing more than the fu­ner­al when you look at it," said Ho­sein.

If the in­dus­try should fold up, Ho­sein said mil­lions of dol­lars in heavy equip­ment would go down the drain. The farm­ers said they would like a meet­ing with Pres­i­dent George Maxwell Richards so that he could lis­ten to their plight. The farm­ers al­so called for the clo­sure of the Agri­cul­ture Min­istry, since it was not look­ing af­ter farm­ers' in­ter­est.

Pres­i­dent of the rice co-op­er­a­tive Fazal Akaloo said the min­istry had promised to in­crease pad­dy prices at the be­gin­ning of last Sep­tem­ber's har­vest. "But that promise nev­er ma­te­ri­alised. We were tak­en for a ride," said Akaloo.

The rep­re­sen­ta­tives asked that the Gov­ern­ment in­crease grade 1 pad­dy from $1 to $2 per pound, while grades 2 and 3 be moved from 80 cents to $1.75 and 60 cents to $1.25, re­spec­tive­ly. Since 1996, farm­ers have been re­ceiv­ing the same pad­dy prices from Na­tion­al Flour Mills (NFM) even though cost of pro­duc­tion had in­creased by 200 per cent. To add in­sult to in­jury, the farm­ers dis­cov­ered that a pad­dy pro­pos­al, which they had sub­mit­ted to the min­istry since 2007, was turned down by some com­mit­tee mem­bers of Cab­i­net.

Farmer Richard Singh said this move was in to­tal con­tra­dic­tion to what the min­istry had out­lined in its Sep­tem­ber 2008 draft rice pro­duc­tion pol­i­cy.

The pol­i­cy clear­ly stat­ed that against the back­drop of world short­ages and in­creas­ing na­tion­al prices for rice, there was need for a na­tion­al rice pol­i­cy in sup­port of a rea­son­able lev­el of food se­cu­ri­ty. It al­so stat­ed that de­clin­ing lo­cal rice pro­duc­tion had led to in­crease rice im­ports to sig­nif­i­cant lev­els.

In 2006, the val­ue of rice im­ports was $75 mil­lion. In 1992, to­tal pad­dy pro­duc­tion was 21,200 met­ric tonnes, which was ap­prox­i­mate­ly 30 per cent of do­mes­tic de­mand. At that time there were ap­prox­i­mate­ly 6,000 rice farm­ers in the in­dus­try.

In 2007, those fig­ured dropped sig­nif­i­cant­ly to 5,965 tonnes re­duc­ing do­mes­tic sup­ply of to­tal rice de­mand to 8.4 per cent. To­day, there are less than 40 farm­ers in­volved in pad­dy pro­duc­tion in Ca­roni and Plum Mi­tan, NRG mem­ber Fayraz Akaloo said. "The odds were against us. We had so many is­sues to deal with from se­cu­ri­ty of land tenure to poor rice seeds, ris­ing cost of chem­i­cals and fer­tilis­ers and even the un­avail­abil­i­ty of in­fra­struc­ture com­po­nents," Akaloo (Fayraz) ex­plained.

In or­der to achieve a sat­is­fac­to­ry lev­el of food se­cu­ri­ty, the pol­i­cy stat­ed that a pro­duc­tion lev­el of 25 per cent had been tar­get­ed. With falling oil prices and the glob­al fi­nan­cial melt­down, Ho­sein feels soon NFM would stop pur­chas­ing their rice and would im­port from Guyana, which has in­creased its rice pro­duc­tion due to fi­nan­cial as­sis­tance from the Eu­ro­pean Union and the Latin Amer­i­can fund.

Ho­sein said the coun­try should have learned from last year's rice short­age, where many ma­jor world rice pro­duc­ers re­duced their ex­port and in some cas­es kept the ba­sic com­mod­i­ty for their own con­sump­tion and to re­plen­ish their de­plet­ing stock. "If the farm­ers de­cid­ed to call it a day and should an­oth­er cri­sis takes place we would have noth­ing to fall back on. It's on­ly then the Gov­ern­ment would wake up. But by then it would be too late," said Ho­sein. Akaloo (Fazal) said for three years the farm­ers had tried to ac­quire NFM's rice mill, which was priced at $14 mil­lion af­ter the State-owned com­pa­ny had com­plained that the mill was op­er­at­ing at a loss.

Mill own­ers

The farm­ers said the Gov­ern­ment paid NFM $450,000 a month to keep the mill op­er­a­tional. Last June, the farm­ers were tak­en by sur­prise when an ad­ver­tise­ment in the dai­ly news­pa­pers in­vit­ed prospec­tive buy­ers to make a bid on the NFM's mill, which at that time was 51 per cent owned by the Gov­ern­ment, while NFM has 49 per cent own­er­ship stake.

Again the farm­ers sub­mit­ted a bid, which they did not win. "We are be­ing fight down at every cost." Singh in­ter­ject­ed. Akaloo said so far, Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers has not made an an­nounce­ment as to who is the new own­er the of mill. "Why wasn't the farm­ers' pro­pos­al con­sid­ered, since we were seek­ing to im­ple­ment a draft rice pol­i­cy to move for­ward?" said Akaloo (Fazal). "All these are in­di­ca­tions that things are not like­ly to get any bet­ter.

We are see­ing some dark days ahead for 2009."