The rice cooked in the Premium Rice Cooker during the demonstration at Super Plus Food Store, Bogue, St. James last week. Photo by Claudine Housen/Staff Photographer

Guyana is threatening legal action against its Caricom member states which routinely breach a five year pact on production, export and import of the commodity.

Senior rice officials in Georgetown, including chairman of the Caribbean Rice Association (CRA), Beni Sankar, complain that the region had regressed five years after the regional montoring mechanism (LMM) was introduced to help regularise the rice trade.

"We are back to square one," said Sankar.

"The Caricom system is just not working."

Guyana is one of the 15-member bloc.

Several regional countries routinely ignore the requirement, a Caricom-based trade body has found, or, at best, provide only partial data while sidestepping application for the 25 per cent common external tariff (CET) on imported rice.

Sankar acknowledged some improvement in trade in 2004 and 2005, but insisted that the delinquent states do not appear to want the system to work and called on local officials to make stronger representation to the regional body.

The CARICOM Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) has asked Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevisand St. Vincent and the Grenadines to explain the non-submission of data on their individual rice imports.

COTED has also instructed all Caricom member states to observe the deadline for submission of the critical information.

An excerpt from the final report of the last regular COTED meeting held in Georgetown last November found that "the non-submission and extremely late submission of the agreed data meant that the required analysis of the data to inform action with respect to the development of the rice sector cannot be completed."

Dominica, Guyana, Montserrat, St. Lucia, Jamaica and Suriname have submitted the required data. Trade officials are hoping that these blunders would be corrected in time for next month's COTED meeting, and according to Jagnarine Singh, general manager of the Guyana Rice Development Board, if the completed reports show breaches, local rice farmers and millers who suffer heavy financial losses would be encouraged to seek legal redress at the level of the Caribbean Court of Justice.

COTED set up the RMM in 2002 following sustained complaints by Guyana that several Caricom countries were not providing timely information on their needs and were also not applying the CET to extra-regional imports of rice.

Guyana, which at the turn of the century was exporting about 260,000 metric tonnes of the grain, has always argued that it can supply rice for regional consumption but this would require that member states provide timely data on production, imports and exports to the Caricom Secretariat twice yearly.

- CMC

Publication: Daily Gleaner