Essequibo rice giant sells assets under pressure from bank

…denies selling Berbice properties

Beni Sankar, son of late rice magnate Kayman Sankar, has affirmed that certain assets were indeed sold because of pressure from a commercial bank.
According to the rice industrialist, the rice milling and drying facilities at Hampton Court, Essequibo Coast were sold for some $600M in order to cover debts with a local bank. He disclosed that those were the only properties sold, and affirmed that the property at Blairmont, West Bank Berbice and the air strip and aquaculture farms have not been sold.

“We were asset-rich but cash (deficient),” Sankar said. “So we decided to sell a part of Hampton Court — which is the milling system and the drying system. We have not sold the Blairmont operation, because it is in litigation.”
Kayman Sankar has been acclaimed as Guyana’s most successful rice farmer/miller. He rose from poverty working as a labourer, and became a millionaire and a household name on the Essequibo Coast and Guyana as a whole. The rice magnate died in 2014, after a prolonged illness.
The downsizing of Sankar’s rice operations and eventual exit from the industry comes on the heels of reports of other rice farmers and millers exiting the industry. Beni Sankar has stated that selling off some of the family’s assets has nothing to do with the decline in the rice industry.

There has been a general decline in rice prices on the international market over the past few years. This trend has had more consequences for some rice-producing countries than others.
The implications for the Caribbean and Guyana have already been realised, and have already threatened the comparatively high prices that were enjoyed in years gone by.
Nevertheless, Agriculture Minister Noel Holder had revealed that rice production was expected to increase by 1.3 per cent in 2017, although there was a decline during 2016 by 12.7 per cent to 600,000 metric tonnes due to El Niño weather conditions.
Holder said that a number of farmers had exited the industry owing to the loss of the high-priced Venezuelan market, but explained that 3311 hectares were lost out of the 76,717 hectares sown.
It was reported that production for 2015 was 1,058,129 tonnes paddy, the equivalent of 687,784 tonnes of rice. That was 80,840 tonnes, or 8.27 per cent, higher than the production for 2014.