Saving water for the dry times

Apr 12, 2016 Editorial, Features / Columnists

The long dry spell appears to be abating but there is still no break. There have been the sporadic showers that have done little to increase the amount of water in the reservoirs. Agriculturally the average citizen would not notice any effect. One goes into the marketplace and sees fresh greens and vegetables on display.
Farmers from the agricultural belt keep trucking their produce to the city and other locations for sale. Further, there has been no report of a decline in exports. Prices have not fluctuated either, leaving one to wonder at the effect of the dry spell.
But there is a chance for the agriculturists to correct whatever situation existed that led to the drying of creeks and canals. Coastal Guyana gets most of its irrigation water from the backlands. During the wet spells water would accumulate in the savannahs and in the conservancy. Robert Persaud, as Agricultural Minister, had undertaken a series of programmes to ensure that water flows into the canals.
Some of the programmes were never completed but at least there was some water in times of need. But habit is something that supports the adage that willful waste makes woeful want. We are not known to save in the good times, not even when it comes to finances. Under no pressure, people tend to relax on future plans.
Similarly, in times of a heavy concentration of water in the canals farmers simply go about using what they want and allowing the rest to go to waste. Perhaps this attitude was fuelled by the fact that Guyana is rarely without irrigation water.
In some countries the focus is on reservoirs—large manmade lakes that store water. Guyana has the conservancies but these have proven to be inadequate during prolonged dry spells. Being an agricultural country the focus should be on creating reservoirs. Guyana is a rice-bearing country; rice is a crop that requires a lot of water. This dry spell hit farmers hard, so hard that some of them complained of reaping wind paddy (paddy without rice).
There was the fear that the dry spell would have hit the farmers so hard that many would have collapsed. For one, farmers owed the commercial banks. That the millers were not prepared to pay what the farmers would have considered a satisfactory rate, one that would have allowed them to cover their debt, was a factor.
At the same time, Guyana seems to be experiencing shrinking rice markets. Millers who are also the major exporters have been complaining about the stockpiles that they have. Some even threatened to refrain from buying paddy this crop, further compounding the plight of the farmers. However the government has stepped in.
A few years ago, the government opted to dig the Hope Canal with a view to discharging water into the Atlantic Ocean, from the East Demerara Water Conservancy. It would have been so much better to fashion a reservoir to store the water for times like these.
Amazingly, while the entire country was hit by the dry spell, Essequibo with its fresh water lakes, survived the worst. Not much was said but those lakes supplied water to many rice fields. While the farmers in many other parts of the country were ruing their misfortune those in Essequibo were capitalizing on their good fortune. They were enjoying water from three major natural reservoirs.
What is frustrating is the fact that the weather experts had predicted that the dry spell would have ended in March. April is almost halfway through and the dry spell seems far from abating.

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Saving water for the dry times

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