–some instructed by the political opposition not to pay

By Clifford Stanley

FARMERS in the Mahaica/ Mahaicony/ Abary Agricultural Development Authority area (MMA/ADA) owe the Authority in excess of $600M for drainage and irrigation services and land rent, General Manager Aubrey Charles has disclosed.
Charles said that at the moment, payments by farmers amounted to about 30% of the sums needed for the provision of D&I services and as such, the farmers should understand that the MMA will only be able to provide the level of service they require if they honour their obligations.

He said that the flow of payments seems to suggest that farmers had been reneging on their debts to the MMA even more, after the increase in D&I Charges for 2017. He stressed, ”It should be made clear that the D&I rates prior to 2017 had been held down at a low level since 2006. Indeed, there had been no increase in D&I rates for the past ten years prior to the increases for 2017– this even while the costs of maintenance of the scheme had been increasing by leaps and bounds.”
He opined: “Had the rates been increased in an incremental way to match the increase in operational costs between 2006 and 2016, it is quite possible that they would have been at their current level. But rice farmers got away with not having to pay any increase for ten years and they must know that they have to pay up or risk losing their crops, because we can only do so much with the limited funds available.”
He added: “I am told that despite the rains, farmers in the scheme are already complaining about lack of irrigation to their plots due to secondary canals and secondary drains being clogged up. There is little the MMA can do about this unless the attitude to payments to the MMA by these farmers changes.”

The MMA/ADA scheme is divided into three sections: the Abary/Berbice area, the Mahaicony/Abary area and the Mahaica / Mahaicony area. Most of the farmers who are in default with their payments are rice farmers cultivating crops in the Abary/Berbice area. The D&I rates for the Abary/Berbice rice cultivation was raised from a maximum of $2500 per acre to $8,000 per acre and the land rent charges increased from $1,000 per acre per year to $7,000 per acre per year for 2017.
This meant an overall increase from $3500 per acre per year to $15,000 per acre per year. The D&I charges for the Abary/Mahaicony area had been increased from $1241 to $7000 per acre per year and in the Mahaicony/Mahaica area, from a situation where the farmers there had not been asked to pay for D&I charges, even though these services had been provided, from zero to $5000 per acre per year.
Farmers have since protested against the increases, saying that they had been too steep. Charles said that in response to the poor payment by farmers, the Board of the MMA had decided to focus its resources on maintenance of the main drains and canals first, and then the secondary drains and canals, as funds become available.
He added that the MMA had observed an increase in payments at the end of the spring crop (March 2017) and hoped that this trend will continue. Charles noted that the MMA had the option of repossessing the lands from defaulters, but was at the moment encouraging those farmers who have large sums of money outstanding to visit the office and work out a payment plan to eliminate their indebtedness.

Meanwhile, a reliable source within the rice industry in Region 5 (Mahaica/Berbice) disclosed that part of the reasons for the large amount of monies owed to the MMA was that many farmers had been encouraged by the political opposition not to pay any charges, because they said the increases had been too steep. “They had these bottom house meetings where they instructed the farmers not to pay any rates to the MMA,” that source said. The official stressed that the D&I charges of the MMA had been deliberately kept at an unrealistic level by the previous Administration for more than ten years, thereby starving the Management of the Scheme of the funds It required to provide efficient services.”
“If the MMA had been allowed to increase the D&I charges in an incremental way during those years, those new rates would have been less of a problem right now,” he said. He stressed that farmers should pay up because they can lose their crops if the D&I channels as well as the primary and secondary access dams continue to deteriorate, as they undoubtedly will, due to lack of maintenance.