(GuyanaChronicle)THE Government of Guyana is providing technical support to Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) in its quest to rebuild its rice industry, Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha has said.
Mustapha, who chairs the special ministerial task force for food production and food security at the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), told reporters on the sidelines of a recent event that the initiative is part of a wider collaboration among regional leaders to reduce the food importation bill by 25 per cent by the Year 2025.
Collaboration has been a top priority for regional governments to achieve the ambitious target.
“You know, Trinidad used to plant rice before. We are working with them, and would have supplied them with seed paddy the other day. We have some technical people working along with their technical people, so they have started replanting rice,” Minister Mustapha said, adding that
there is a high demand for rice across the world.
“India would have withdrawn a lot of rice from the market, so there are a lot of markets now for rice,” he said.
India is the world’s largest rice-exporting country today, but in an effort to tackle local inflation on prices for this staple crop, the Indian government recently decided to ban foreign exports of non-basmati varieties. That applies to roughly half of India’s regular rice exports.
As it relates to Trinidad and Tobago, agriculture officials have been encouraging farmers to plant more.
According to a recent report carried by the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspapers, farmers were urged to plant 5,000 acres of rice to obtain food security. This call came following Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley, Agriculture Minister Kazim Hosein and Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Avinash Singh’s attendance at the first regional meeting on agriculture and an agri-investment forum and ‘expo’ held in Guyana in May 2022.
According to the T&T media outlet, the island is not self-sufficient in rice, as, annually, they import 34,000 tonnes of the staple, costing $121 million, from Guyana and elsewhere in South America.
Up to 1995, over 6,000 farmers cultivated at least 30 per cent of the country’s rice supply (21,000 tonnes), with a surplus to export.
Back in 2019, the Trinidad Express reported that the island’s rice industry was facing a collapse. That year, flood waters had washed away farmers’ seeds, the article said.
At the 33rd Inter-Sessional Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM in Belize in 2022, it was announced that Guyana would host the first Regional Agri-Investment Forum and ‘Expo’. The second exposition was held in Trinidad & Tobago later that year.
This year, in Guyana, the conference will be held at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre from October 20-22.
