-for use in improving dam maintenance
AGRICULTURE Minister Robert Persaud on Thursday handed over a bulldozer that
cost almost $34M to Region Six Chairman, Zulfikar Mustapha at a ceremony
held at Whim, Berbice.
The bulldozer is to be used to address issues of dam access and dam maintenance, a critical concern of rice farmers in the region.
Minister Persaud told the farmers present at the handing over ceremony that the ministry has been successful in addressing the issue of drainage and irrigation in the region, helped significantly in part by the six excavators it provided.
With the assistance of these equipment, he said “for the first time in many years, the
region was successfully able to rehabilitate and upgrade a number of drainage systems.”
The ministry’s focus is now on dam access and dam maintenance, he said. “We recognized that we can have the best canals, adequate irrigation and farmers still complain about the cost and difficulty they have in accessing the farm or in moving their produce or paddy from the field to mill.”
“So we have in a very focused way decided that we will be allocating a certain amount of resources to be able to purchase a number of those bulldozers so that we can in a very systematic way support the regional administration, the Neighbhourhood Democratic Council (NDC) towards these issues,” he added.
This assistance is part of an overall programme to improve the capacity of not only Region Six as this will be replicated in other agriculture regions in the country. The ministry has purchased four bulldozers, and Regions Two, Three and Four will each benefit from one.
The bulldozers will work based on a programme submitted by the farmers, through the NDCs, the Water Users Association and the Farmers’ Organisations.
“You have one bulldozer, it cannot work on 25 dams at one time, so we will
depend on the farmers to prioritize to have these access dams done so that at the end of the day we can have improved farming conditions,” Minister Persaud told the farmers.
Over the years, Government has been able to successfully double the amount of land as well as improve yield and productivity in rice farming areas across the regions.
Minister Persaud told farmers that for the first time in history, the country is expected to hit 400,000 tonnes of rice production.
This is a significant amount in terms of production, compared to where we were in 1991 and producing less than 100, 000 tonnes of rice, he said. “We have come a long way and we want to support you the farmers, support the industry in its forward movement in this regard,” the Minister said.
“And that is why we will continue as we have done, to invest in the required resources, so that we can make all levels of farming possible,” he added, and urged farmers to continue to focus on Government’s vision and support for them and to not for any moment be distracted by those who will seek to misrepresent what Government has been doing, especially in this political season.
Region Six Chairman, Zulfikar Mustapha said that dams have always been a main concern of farmers in the region, more so during periods of harvesting.
The region has expended a lot of money to improve the dams, he said, and for this reason he is happy to receive the equipment which will help tremendously.
Mustapha also said that over the last five years, the region has seen a very steep improvement especially in the rice sector because of the investment and the infrastructure that both Central Government and Regional Democratic Council (RDC) have been putting into the region. (GINA)