Latest update January 9th, 2025 4:10 AM
Sep 26, 2011 News
– to assist rice farmers, improve dam maintenance
A $34M bulldozer was last Thursday given to the Region Six district by the Ministry of Agriculture to address issues of dam access and dam maintenance, a critical concern of rice farmers in the region.
According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the machine was handed over to the Region Six Chairman, Zulfikar Mustapha at a ceremony held at Whim, Berbice.
Minister of Agriculture Robert Persaud told the farmers present at the handing over ceremony, that the Ministry has been successful in addressing the issue of drainage and irrigation in the region. This helped significantly in part by the six excavators it previously provided.
He said with the assistance of these equipment, “for the first time in many years, the region was successfully able to rehabilitate and upgrade a number of drainage systems.”
“We recognized that we can have the best canals, adequate irrigation and farmers still complain about the cost and difficulty they have in accessing the farm or in moving their produce or paddy from the field to mill,” Persaud said. “So we have in a very focused way decided that we will be allocating a certain amount of resources to be able to purchase a number of those bulldozers so that we can in a very systematic way, support the regional administration, the Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC) towards these issues.”
According to the Ministry, the bulldozers will work based on a programme submitted by the farmers, through the NDCs, the Water Users Association and the Farmers’ Organisations. “You have one bulldozer, it cannot work on 25 dams at one time, so we will depend on the farmers to prioritize to have these access dams done so that at the end of the day we can have improved farming conditions,” Minister Persaud told the farmers.
He said that for the first time in history, the country is expected to hit 400,000 tonnes of rice production. This is a significant amount in terms of production compared to where we were in 1991 and producing less than 100,000 tonnes of rice, he said.
Region Six Chairman, Zulfikar Mustapha said that dams have always been a main concern of farmers in the region, more so during periods of harvesting.
The region has expended a lot of money to improve the dams, he said, and for this reason he is happy to receive the equipment which will help tremendously.
Mustapha also said that over the last five years the region has seen a very steep improvement, especially in the rice sector because of the investment and the infrastructure that both Central Government and Regional Democratic Council (RDC) have been putting into the region.
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