Wednesday 8th January, 2025

It is still being claimed in some quarters that the current rice shortage has come about owing to the use of rice/paddy for manufacturing beer. Among the peddlers of this view are some powerful rice millers including Dudley Sirisena, who cannot be expected to tell the public the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth for obvious reasons. SJB National Organiser Tissa Attanayake has also subscribed to the aforesaid claim.

Some brewers may be using paddy/rice for producing beer on the sly, but it is not possible that their unlawful practice can affect the entire national rice supply. After all, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, some of his ministers, the Department of Agriculture, independent agricultural experts, and market watchers have confirmed that the country produced a paddy surplus last year, and no huge increase in the local beer production has been reported during the past few months. Therefore, it does not stand to reason that the rice shortage is mainly due to the beer manufacturers’ unlawful practice at issue. Most of all, if it is true that beer manufacturing has caused the depletion of rice stocks, how come the rice supply suddenly increases when the Millers’ Mafia is given free rein to increase the prices of rice? Is it that they are capable of turning beer made from paddy into rice to be sold at exorbitant prices?

The claim that brewers are responsible for the current rice scarcity serves the interests of both the Millers’ cartel hoarding rice and the government, which is not equal to the task of tracing the hoarded rice despite its rhetoric The SJB has demanded to know why the rice shortage persists in spite of rice imports. Attanayake has asked rhetorically whether the imported rice also finds its way into breweries. The SJB is barking up the wrong tree.

The Millers’ Mafia is still capable of manipulating the rice market and keeping prices high; some of them are among the rice importers, according to media reports. Another reason for this situation is that instead of leveraging imports to bring the prices of rice down to affordable levels, the government increased the price of imported rice by imposing a 65-rupee tax per kilo. It thus safeguarded the interests of the powerful millers, who craftily offered to sell rice at the maximum retail prices, immediately after the last presidential election, thereby making the small and medium-scale millers panic and dispose of all their stocks post-haste. Today, only the Millers’ Mafia has enough paddy stocks to carry out market manipulations.

In 2020, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government committed a mega sugar scam by slashing the special commodity levy on imported sugar at the behest of a major sugar importer who funded the SLPP’s election campaigns. Has there been a rice scam under the current dispensation? Whether anyone connected to the ruling coalition has benefited from the largesse of the Millers’ cartel, which has stood to gain from the 65-rupee import levy, remains to be seen. This is something the Opposition should make a serious effort to find out instead of being distracted by red herrings thrown in by big-time millers and their political friends.

If what we have witnessed all these years is anything to go by, more rice will have to be imported in the next few weeks, and the large-scale millers will release some of their stocks to the market thereafter, causing the prices of rice to drop in time for the beginning of the next harvesting period so that they can buy paddy at lower prices and subsequently increase the prices of rice through hoarding.

If the government is genuinely interested in looking after the interests of the rice growers and consumers, it will make more storage facilities and funds available for the Paddy Marketing Board urgently to build a buffer stock while ensuring that small and medium-scale millers have funds to purchase paddy when harvesting commences. That is the way to liberate the paddy market from the clutches of the Millers’ cartel. Mere rhetoric and table thumping will not do; the government will have to grasp the nettle.