Georgetown : Minister of State Joseph Harmon, at his post-Cabinet press briefing yesterday, announced that Government will accept the resignation of General Manager of the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) Jagnarine Singh. According to Minister Harmon, in addition to the resignation of Singh, “the current Board will not (just) be reshuffled, but a new one will be installed.”
Mr. Harmon revisited some unsavoury developments with the ‘soon to go’ Board, when on many occasions, “rice farmers from Region Two, on quite a few occasions made repeated calls for Singh to be removed and a new Board be installed.”
The Minister added that as regards the “continuation of the PetroCaribe Fund, Minister of Finance Winston Jordan briefed Cabinet on impending actions.’
Minister Jordan will soon lead a team of high-level officials to Venezuela sometime next week, to “negotiate on the continuation of the PetroCaribe deal.” It is expected that during talks, “there will be very strong representation from the rice sector on selling rice to Venezuela and to inquire as to the possibility of the extension of the present arrangement which comes to an end in October of 2015,” he said.
“The market for Guyana’s rice is a major issue and the Venezuela market takes up about 36% of the rice Guyana exports (and) hence the ‘strengthened team’ will negotiate,” Minister Harmon said, noting that the country is looking for better prices and bigger, longer markets.
He added that the future modus operandi for the rice sector will be akin to what is now obtaining within the sugar industry, in “that money which has to be paid on the shipment of rice to Venezuela, under the PetroCaribe deal, would be be done by applying a formula, as is being done for sugar, which means that we will not be putting the money into the hands of the people who have been there and diverting it to all different types of projects.”
In proffering Government’s reason for this, Minister Harmon said that “the industry has too much at stake, and as a nation, we have to provide the country with careful explanations as to how we deal with the patrimony of the State, how we manage the affairs of the State and I don’t believe we can give any proper explanation to the Guyanese people if you are just to continue pumping money into the hands of people who are spending it without giving any proper explanations.”
The Minister buttressed this motivation by recalling that Government had discovered that the PetroCaribe fund was totally bankrupt, and had later found out that as much as US$141 million was used from it to finance a number of projects sanctioned by the former government.
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