100 years of rice exports

Nov 10, 2008 Editorial

It is said that a prophet is not honoured in his own country. Well, over the course of last Friday and Saturday, the staple rice, long taken for granted by us in Guyana, was highlighted and, indeed, honoured at an international symposium and a “Rice Fest” at the Conference Centre and National Stadium respectively.

It is now a hundred years since we have been exporting rice, and in this, the humble grain has been a prophet of our own emancipation in this country.

Rice, after all, is a crop and a commodity that has been developed almost completely by the ordinary citizens of this country.

We had been founded as a colony to produce primary products for export to the European “mother” countries: sugar, cotton and rum were deemed desirable and attracted capital. It was the African slaves who first introduced rice into Guyana to supplement their meagre diet.

However, it was never in the interest of the colonial power to allow the slaves, even after they became free, to become independent; and the expansion of the crop was stillborn. Rice continued to be imported.

It was well into the late nineteenth century that rice cultivation became “rooted” as a feature of the local landscape, when severe pressures threatened the viability of the entire sugar industry.

The price of sugar plummeted, and so did the wages of the indentured labourers who had replaced the slaves on the sugar plantations. They were primarily from India; more specifically from the Gangeatic plains, where wet rice cultivation was a way of life for millennia.

The plantation owners opportunistically saw the venture into rice cultivation as a means for them to kill two birds with one stone.

By offering the indentured labourers, who were entitled to a return passage to India, small plots of land to cultivate the rice, they tied them near the plantation to be available for the seasonal high labour intensive cane cutting periods, while at the same time supplement their wages to make their pittance from sugar acceptable.

From that small crevice that was opened up, the labourers slowly expanded their cultivation by purchasing land as several sugar plantations collapsed. Edinburgh, which is a part of present-day Leonora, was the first large plot cultivated.

Today the plot is used to plant grass for cattle, and as we are now acknowledging the role of rice in our development, maybe the Ministry of Agriculture can erect a memorial in honour of the rice pioneers at that site.

Rice was first exported at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to providing enough rice to meet all domestic demand – and saving the country from having to deploy foreign currency towards this end – rice now began to earn foreign reserves for the treasury.

WWI (1914-18) provided the impetus for official encouragement of the strategic importance of rice cultivation, which by then had spread countrywide. With the disruption of supplies from Asia, the local rice was literally a godsend.

We have been regaled with the facts of the crucial role that rice occupies in the modern Guyanese economy, and we need not repeat them here. What we have to acknowledge is that we are in an analogous period, as with WWI, when the production of rice received a great fillip.

The world is in the cusp of a rising demand for rice as the two largest consumers of rice, China and India, balance their thrust for exports by expanding domestic consumption as a consequence of the financial meltdown that is rocking their major external markets.

This demand will, at a minimum, hold prices steady, since rice is piggybacking on top of the global shortage of grains precipitated by the rush into biofuels.

We are not against diversification of our agricultural base, but we are of the opinion that rice is a bird in the hand that can deliver much more to Guyana than it has in the past – if the government gives it the requisite support.

We commend the minister for raising the issue of crop-insurance, and urge him to become creative in sourcing inputs for the industry.

There should be a planned program to raise our production of rice to one million tons per annum.

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100 years of rice exports

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