Riyadh ‘must pay farmers’ dues quickly

Gulf News

29 April 1999

Reuters

A Saudi agriculture expert said yesterday an emergency wheat production plan announced by the kingdom’s cabinet would only be effective if farmers received long-awaited back payments first.

“Saudi Arabia was producing four million tones plus or minus, but they didn’t pay the farmers for a long time and this quantity went down and down, and we think that now it is below a million tonnes” said Turki Faisal Al Rasheed, president of Saudi agricultural firm Golden Grass, Inc.

Saudi Arabia has been trying to catch up on huge arrears to farmers which built up after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis.

In December last year, press reports said Saudi was to pay local wheat and barley farmers 1.4 billion riyals to cover part of their 1995-96 harvest-a payment which the government said would cover 64.4 per cent of the crop value.

Emergency plans

The official Saudi Press Agency (SPA) on Monday reported that the cabinet had instructed the agriculture ministry to prepare emergency wheat production plans to meet unexpected additional needs.

Agriculture sources said farmers had been instructed to grow enough to fulfill the kingdom’s wheat needs, estimated at 1.25-1.5 million tonnes, according to government statistics, and the plan was purely for contingency reasons. He said there was currently 400,000 tonnes of wheat in storage.

But Rasheed believed the Kingdom was not producing enough to cover demand. Saudi wheat consumption is usually met by local production.