{"id":154,"date":"2010-01-31T18:06:23","date_gmt":"2010-01-31T15:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/?p=154"},"modified":"2018-04-06T01:07:05","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T22:07:05","slug":"riyadh-must-pay-farmers-dues-quickly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/riyadh-must-pay-farmers-dues-quickly\/","title":{"rendered":"Riyadh ‘must pay farmers’ dues quickly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Riyadh ‘must pay farmers’ dues quickly<\/strong>
\nGulf News
\n29 April 1999
\nReuters<\/h1>\n

 <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia has been trying to catch up on huge arrears to farmers which built up after the 1990-91 Gulf crisis.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Emergency plans<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But Rasheed believed the Kingdom was not producing enough to cover demand. Saudi wheat consumption is usually met by local production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":155,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4709,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154\/revisions\/4709"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tfrasheed.org\/e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}