How taxpayers paid for relief — and got burden instead

BY: Hem Kumar 

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣

Royal Chicken and its consortium benefitted from state-backed land and infrastructure meant to lower feed costs and reduce food prices. Instead, the public now faces imported concessions, local exports, and no meaningful relief at the checkout line.
The Royal Chicken arrangement is a textbook example of how public power can be used to manufacture private advantage while ordinary citizens are left to carry the cost.
What was presented to the Guyanese people as a bold agricultural solution was supposed to do several things at once: build local soya and corn production, reduce dependence on imports, lower feed costs, support farmers, and eventually bring down the price of chicken and eggs. To make that happen, taxpayers helped fund the land, the roads, the silos, the wharf, and the wider infrastructure needed to sustain the project.
That was the promise. Relief.
But the reality now emerging is deeply troubling.
Royal Chicken is still reportedly receiving duty-free concessions for feedstock imports, even as the consortium tied to that taxpayer-supported venture is exporting locally grown product that was supposed to help meet domestic needs. In plain terms, the public financed a system designed to reduce costs, but the same system appears to be allowing the same players to import tax-free and export for profit at the same time.
That means the people have been made to pay twice.
First, they paid through taxes that helped build the infrastructure and support the venture. Then they paid again in the market, where food prices remain high and the promised relief has not materialized. The burden never went away; it was simply shifted onto the backs of consumers.
This is not a small administrative mistake. It is a serious abuse of public trust.
A handful of dominant operators appear to benefit from every side of the arrangement: public land, public infrastructure, import concessions, and market control. Meanwhile, small farmers continue to struggle with high production costs, and ordinary households continue to face expensive chicken and eggs. The people who were supposed to benefit from the policy are the very people still paying the price for its failure.
If the goal was self-sufficiency, why are imports still being subsidized? If the goal was lower prices, why is the consumer still suffering? If the goal was to strengthen local production, why is local output being exported while domestic demand remains under pressure?
Those questions go to the heart of the matter. This is not simply about feedstock. It is about whether state policy is being used to serve the public interest or to protect a privileged few.
The greatest insult is that the public was sold a story of relief, development, and national benefit. Instead, it appears to have received a system where taxpayers underwrote the infrastructure, subsidized the imports, and still did not receive affordable food in return.
That is why this issue has cut so deeply. It is not just a policy failure. It is a warning about what happens when public resources are captured by private interests under the banner of development.
The result is brutally simple: the people paid for the relief, and then they were left subsidizing the very arrangement that denied it to them.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 592 𝙂𝙪𝙖𝙧𝙙𝙞𝙖𝙣-𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 , 𝘼𝙘𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙞𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙮,𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙄𝙣𝙂𝙪𝙮𝙖𝙣𝙖 𝘼𝙣𝙙 𝘾𝙖𝙧𝙞𝙗𝙗𝙚𝙖𝙣 𝙋𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙥𝙚𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨.— ✦—