Guyana’s Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo has indicated that there is documentary evidence that Venezuela’s decision to end the PetroCaribe oil for rice deal was communicated to former PPP government long before the May 11 elections but the former administration never made the issue known to the Guyanese public.
The Prime Minister said the former Agriculture Minister, the former Foreign Minister and the Ambassador to Venezuela were all aware of the Venezuelan position.
“It is sad and inexcusable that the Guyanese people were not advised of this by the former PPP government. Questions will now have to be asked as to whether the Guyanese people, and the thousands of rice farmers in particular who could be affected, were being held hostage by the PPP’s silence purely for the purposes of narrow politicking”, Nagamootoo said in a statement on his Facebook page.
The new APNU+AFC government only learnt last week that the deal was coming to an end when Finance Minister Winston Jordan and a team headed to Caracas to renegotiate the deal.
Prime Minister Nagamootoo in his statement said “the revelation comes on the heels of Venezuela’s actions to challenge what is lawfully Guyana’s territory and it will have to be considered whether Venezuela’s position of the non-renewal of the Petro Caribe barter agreement is indeed an act of economic sanction against Guyana.
The special arrangement has been in place for a number of years and earlier this year when former Agriculture Minister Leslie Ramsammy visited Venezuela, he claimed that he had secured a new deal. However, it was never communicated that the new deal was not a long-term one.
Nagamooto said the government will explore fully, all options to ensure that farmers and those dependent on Guyana’s rice industry are not adversely affected.
Many rice farmers and millers depend heavily on the petrocaribe deal as a guarantee to ensure the sale of their rice. Some millers have invested millions of dollars to upgrade their facilities to accommodate the requirements that were put in place for the deal.
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