ESSEQUIBIAN businessman Roopan Ramotar has said Pomeroon has the potential to become the breadbasket of the Caribbean. The soil is fertile and almost anything could be grown there and that is the foundation on which he intends to build his year-old agricultural enterprise at Caledonia, along the Pomeroon River. Approximately two years ago, Mr. Ramotar made the bold decision to further diversify his agricultural endeavours and go into the potentially lucrative production of coconuts, plantains and bananas.  
Known also throughout Essequibo Coast as ‘Fowl Cock’, sometime in 2011, he reclaimed a sizeable piece of land from the river, built it up by about five feet with dirt rich in humus and compost and began planting several cash crops interspersed with plantain and banana suckers that have already begun to yield huge, rich bunches.  
In January 2012, he undertook an ambitious coconut project, putting down several hundred three-year seedlings and expects to reap upwards of one million coconuts by 2015 from the 300 acres cultivation.  
He has a ready market locally, as do hundreds of other cash crop planters living and producing food on the banks of the Pomeroon.  His sight, however, is set on markets in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago and the wider Caribbean, including the islands of Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao, located off the Venezuelan northwestern coastline.

LARGE QAUNTITIES
Ramotar told a team from the Guyana Manufacturing and Services Association (GMSA), who recently visited his holdings, that Pomeroon coconut farmers have, for years, been selling their produce to the edible oil manufacturer at nearby Charity but, more recently, buyers have been coming from Trinidad to purchase coconut water in large quantities, especially around Carnival time.
His plans for expansion and long term growth of the coconut/plantain plantation are well laid out and he spoke of acquiring a harvesting machine, complete with a hydraulic bucket boom that would be sourced from overseas in 2015.
By then, through another first, since he is certain that it is not yet in use here, he would have trippled the amount of seedlings already in the ground and be able to reap a bountiful harvest over an extended period.   
“This is a very lucrative business, once we are able to take advantage of the off and on seasons,” Ramotar stated, noting that, rarely would two or three crops be ready for harvesting simultaneously.
Further, he anticipates that the revenue from his cash crops would cover expenditure for husbandry and harvesting the coconuts.
Ramotar’s objective, in the short to medium term, is to build an enterprise that is backward and forward integrated. His core business is rice farming and milling with 500 acres currently under cultivation at Land of Plenty, on Essequibo Coast.  In recent years, he has been operating a modern rice mill that, not only processes his own produce, but provides small scale farmers on the Coast with services to dry and mill.
To date, he said, marketing his rice has been relatively easy since he became involved in the Petro Caribe agreement to export bulk rice to Venezuela.  
Already involved with housing in a gated community at Coffee Grove, the next venture for Ramotar Investments is acquisition of a packaging plant for processed rice and secondary and tertiary value-added agro-products, which should see the Pomeroon food industry, literally, spring to life.
Currently, this entrepreneur is having his rice brand redesigned and new package labels produced. The GMSA officials on the recent tour of his investments took the opportunity to advise him on label production, design and printing facilities that are now available in Guyana.
According to GMSA President, Mr. Mohindra Chand, the advice can save producers the added cost and inconvenience of acquiring labels from abroad.

NEWEST MEMBER
He informed that the Association’s Secretariat has the capacity to create labels with nutrition and other required information in English and foreign languages, among the range of services it is going to provide its newest member.
The Association has already recommended that Ramotar’s  company be added to the list of Guyanese agro-processors to benefit from the latest Canadian Trade Facilitation Office (TFO) project in Guyana that targets arts and craft artisans, growers and agro-processors.
TFO Canada has begun a series of interventions in local agro- industries with the objective of providing export readiness support and is partnering with the GMSA and the local branches of the Canadian Executive Services Organisation (CESO) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation in Agriculture (IICA) that has been working in the agro-food sector here since 2009.
The TFO project is also intended to prepare Guyanese growers and processors for international organic food and Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) certification.
Meantime, Ramotar Investments is eminently qualified to benefit from the Canada-sponsored programme, said GMSA’s Trade and Investment Director, Mr. Clement Duncan.
He said, with the proprietor so keen to see the growth of agriculture in the Pomeroon and other farmers becoming self-sufficient and food independent, his blossoming enterprise could well serve as a model for bigger farms and higher yields from that fertile river-fed soil.