Hoy newspaper contributor Fabio Herrera-Minino writes today that “sooner or later, putting aside demagoguery, the authorities and rice producers will have to diligently study the notion of gradually reducing the production of rice in lands that, if farmed with other produce, would be much more profitable for the nation,” he says. He recalls a time when rice was imported from Thailand and took such a hold of the Dominican daily diet that the government built irrigation channels to provide free water for producers. He explains how Hawaii eliminated the farming of rice by replacing it with pineapple, beets and macadamia, thus strengthening the economy of those Pacific isles. “We need to study the reduction of the rice lands and diversify our agriculture, and, if rice – no matter how many subsidies are granted – continues to be financially unsustainable, then it would be cheaper to import it,” he writes. By Herrera-Minino’s theory, farmers in the area need to be re-educated to plant more productive crops, as occurred in southwestern Azua, where rice lands were made more lucrative by converting to melon, tomato and sorghum production, has had a positive effect on the area’s prosperity.
Herrera-Minino says that it is necessary, in these days of Free Trade Agreement negotiations with the US and with the second round set for this coming month in Puerto Rico, that negotiators shake themselves of the populist rhetoric and consider rice as an anti-economic crop that requires enormous sacrifices for the state in the hidden costs of the irrigation channels and the water required, making rice crops of value only for rice producers.