Your Eyewitness is pretty chuffed that DDL – famous for pushing its Eldorado brand – has been diversifying into supplying more wholesome drinks. They started out with local fruit drinks like cherry and passion fruit under the “Topco” brand and are proceeding apace on a dairy farm at Moblissa up the Soesdyke Highway to produce 5 million litres of milk annually!! Now, milk’s been a staple of the human diet for eons – even though folks are “lactose intolerant” it suggests they latched onto that source of protein rather late. You gotta domesticate cattle to milk them – ever tried milking a wild cow?? Thought not!!
Anyhow, here in Guyana, it wasn’t till indentured Indians – brought here to provide cheap labour on the sugar plantations after the Africans had been freed – that they used their “cow-minding” culture to sell fresh milk to the rest of the community. Early on – especially in Georgetown – they earned a notorious reputation for “watering down” the milk with trench water!! They soon gravitated from the plantations surrounding Georgetown – like Ruimveldt and Bel Air – into villages like Kitty and Campbellville!! Imagine those now upscale areas as milk-producing farms!!
After the PNC slunk into office in 1964 they came up with the promise “Free Milk and Cassava”!! and decided to enter the big leagues to produce both. At the time most milk was produced on small farms on the coast and transportation was organized to the Milk Pasteurization Plant in Georgetown. Your Eyewitness can still remember those big Aluminium Milk containers lined up on the roadsides waiting for the “Milk Truck”!! But the PNC decided they’d have milk production centralised at a 4000-acre farm at Moblissa on the Linden Highway – and we literally lost corn and husk and the farm failed after squeezing out the coastal milk production!!.
The Milk pasteurization Plant was reduced to reconstituting imported powdered milk!! In 1980, government-owned GusSuCo started diversifying and went into milk as a new product. They established dairy farms at Liliendaal and Versailles and merged all the milk production into one massive failure called LIDCO!! One of its directors later wangled the entire enterprise into his own “private” hands!!
So here we are once again trying to produce milk and save our blushes from importing powdered milk from Barbados!! This time around, even though located at Moblissa, it’s good that the initiative is privately funded – and supported by an Israeli company that has experience in this method of milk production!! Remember President Ali’s visit to that mega milk farm in the UAE desert?? That’s the model DDL will be using – and we see no problem with the projections of soon exporting milk to the Caribbean!!
Let’s milk the opportunity!!
…in Barbados
Pres Ali was in Barbados last week to join the Barbados’ 58 Independence commemoration activities. Yes, dear Reader – they also got independence the same year as we did!! But some might’ve found it strange that there was a large bipartisan US Congressional delegation – headed BY Hakeem Jeffries – joining in the goings on!! How did that come about?? Was it just a free junket to a surf and sand destination?? Truth is, Mia Mottley decided to honor long-time US Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm who would’ve been 100 years old if she were still around.
While Shirley was born in Brooklyn, her mother was Bajan and decided to send her to Barbados for her early education. As the first Black Congresswoman, one of the founders of the Congressional Black caucus and the first female Presidential candidate of any party, Shirley always identified herself as a Bajan!!
Sadly, while her father was a Guyanese, he didn’t seem to have oriented her towards us. But WE should emphasise the connection!!
…on survival tactics
Your Eyewitness just learnt that the AFC and GAP parties are presently engaged in some serious coalition parlay. This means that APNU is effectively dead. And the AFC’s building bulk for its leadership talks with Aubrey!!
