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Millers, cultivators oppose paddy purchasing by district and divisional officers
View(s):By Senuka Jayakody
Rice millers and cultivators, although at odds with each other over the paddy purchase price for Maha season, opposed moves to hand over the paddy purchasing programme to district and divisional secretaries.
They insisted it should stay with the Paddy Marketing Board (PMB).
Moreover, the Government has said it wants to maintain the purchase price at Rs. 100 for a kilogramme of paddy.
“We have to maintain the price of paddy at Rs. 100 a kilo. We have allocated Rs. 10 billion for this purpose,” President Ranil Wickremesinghe told Parliament this week. The Cabinet decided to purchase Maha season paddy through district and divisional secretaries. But the PMB’s Deputy Coordinating Officer Duminda Priyadarshana said the guaranteed price had not yet been decided although Rs. 10bn was allocated for the process.
“Rs. 100 is a good price but the Government should be held accountable for not decreasing prices further, causing losses to cultivators,” United Rice Producers’ Association President Muditha Perera said.
He also said the Government was conspiring to import rice and obtain commissions by sending money to district secretaries. He insisted that the district secretaries would mishandle the funds.
But National Agrarian Collective President Anuradha Tennakoon opposed the President’s proposed purchase price, and he said it was not practical. “It costs Rs. 200,000 to cultivate an acre but the 1,500 kg produced from it, if sold at Rs. 100 a kilo, would only give us Rs. 150,000. If the President requires the price to be low, expenses should be lowered as well,” he said.
District secretaries were “only administration officers”, and the PMB’s responsibilities should not be handed over to them, Mr. Tennakoon said.
The change in purchase procedure would affect the PMB’s functions of price stabilisation and the maintenance of buffer stocks, warned Buddhi Marambe, a senior professor of Crop Science at the Peradeniya University’s Agriculture Faculty.
“When the price increases, the PMB will not be in a position to intervene and they will also lose their buffer stock,” he said. In regard to price, he also said it was important to consider production costs as the economic crisis had drastically driven these up.
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