THE LOOP CLOSES: HOW THE STATE FED A FEED SHORTAGE, THEN CALLED IT A CRISIS

THE LOOP CLOSES: HOW THE STATE FED A FEED SHORTAGE, THEN CALLED IT A CRISIS

Exclusive: Customs Records Show a Tacama Consortium Member Importing Brazilian Feed Duty-Free — Even As the Same Network Exported Guyana’s Soya and Now Seeks Relief for a Chicken Shortage It Helped Create

August,2026 Staff — Investigations Desk

In April, this newsroom asked a question the government has never answered: why, four months after the State-funded Tacama corn-and-soya project began exporting its harvest to Barbados, was Guyana still relying on poultry import waivers to keep chicken on the table? We called it “alchemy” — public capital turned into private export surplus, while the domestic market absorbed the shortfall through the back door.

On August 11, the government made that back door the front page. Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha announced a formal, 330,000-pound-per-week chicken import program, brokered through the New Guyana Marketing Corporation (New GMC), at the direct request of the Guyana Poultry Producers Association (GPPA) — a body whose leadership includes the same consortium interests that built Tacama.

What we could not prove in April, we can now document. A Guyana Revenue Authority exemption letter and a corresponding Customs & Excise declaration, obtained by this newsroom, show that Royal Chicken Inc. — a founding member of the Tacama consortium — secured duty-free, VAT-free entry for 1,500 tons of Brazilian soyabean meal in February 2026, alongside a separate 100-metric-ton shipment of crude soyabean oil from the same Brazilian supplier weeks earlier. Both moved through the Lethem border crossing. Neither shipment came from Tacama.

“The soya beans are exported; the chickens are imported; the money is extracted; and the people are left to pay.”

WHAT THE RECORDS SHOW

The first document is a Guyana Revenue Authority letter, addressed to Rasheed Baksh, General Manager of Royal Chicken Inc., approving a customs duty exemption under the Customs Act and a VAT zero-rating under the Value-Added Tax Act for 1,500 tons of soyabean meal, sourced from North Link Brazil Ltda under a commercial invoice dated February 9, 2026. The exemption is explicitly tied to the stated end-use of the goods and is valid for three months from issue.

The second is a Customs & Excise Department import declaration dated January 26, 2026, recording a separate 100-metric-ton shipment of crude soyabean oil, again from North Link Brazil Ltda of Boa Vista, Roraima, again consigned to Royal Chicken Inc., cleared through the Lethem Multipurpose Complex with a customs value of roughly GY$29.8 million.

Taken individually, these are routine trade filings. Taken together, and set against the public record of Tacama’s stated purpose, they document something else: a consortium member built on the promise of import-substitution, drawing duty-free feed inputs from Brazil in the same window that its own consortium was preparing to export Guyana-grown soya to Barbados.

THE CONSTRUCT

None of this happened in the abstract. Tacama was sold to the Guyanese public in specific terms — cheaper feed, cheaper chicken and eggs, thousands of jobs, and an end to dependence on imported feed inputs that, by the government’s own figures, cost the country close to US$30 million annually before the project began. More than $1.4 billion in public infrastructure — roads, wharves, drying facilities, storage — was committed to make that promise real, benefiting a consortium dominated by Royal Chicken, Guyana Stockfeed, Bounty Farm, Edun Farms, SBM Wood & Dubulay, and the Brazilian-owned NF Agriculture.

On April 12, the government announced the first-ever export of Tacama soya to Barbados, framed by President Ali as evidence of a “full ecosystem for production, value addition, and export.” No tonnage was ever disclosed. No outlet — state or independent — has since published a customs figure for that shipment, or confirmed it moved on schedule.

Every report on the export, without exception, was a verbatim rewrite of the same Department of Public Information release.

Four months later, the same producer class that stood to benefit from that export is the one that went to government asking for emergency chicken imports. GPPA’s own representatives raised declining production against rising demand in the meeting that produced Monday’s announcement. The Association making the request and the consortium exporting the input are not separate interests — Bounty Farm and Royal Chicken sit inside both.

This is the construct: export the surplus when the optics favor it, import the shortfall when the market requires it, and let the public carry the difference in price and in the appearance of scarcity.

A shortage that follows an unmeasured export is not evidence of bad luck. It is evidence of a choice.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY, EXCEPT WHEN IT ISN’T

The Royal Chicken exemption raises a sharper question than the export alone did: was Tacama ever load-bearing for its own consortium’s feed supply, or was it one input stream among several — including a tax-free Brazilian one — while the public-facing justification for the subsidy remained self-sufficiency and import substitution?

A company does not need duty-free access to 1,500 tons of Brazilian soyabean meal, on top of a separate 100-ton crude oil shipment, if the domestic project built to supply it is functioning as advertised. The exemption does not prove Tacama failed outright — but it proves that at least one flagship beneficiary was not relying on it exclusively, at the same time the government was publicising Tacama’s harvest as sufficient to export.

THE SCALE THIS IMPLIES

This newsroom is in possession of one exemption letter, for one company, for one quarter. Royal Chicken is one of at least six named consortium members. If comparable volumes were required by even two or three of the others — and there is no public reason to assume Royal Chicken’s needs were unique among them — the implied annual Brazilian feed import volume tied to this “self-sufficiency” project runs into the tens of thousands of tons, not the fifteen hundred documented here.

We state that plainly as an implication, not a finding. It is not proven by the two documents in our possession, and we will not present it as though it were. But it is the direct and reasonable consequence of the only hard figures currently public: one consortium member, one exemption, fifteen hundred tons, three months’ validity — multiplied across a consortium the government itself credited with transforming Guyana into a “regional powerhouse.”

The government, not this newsroom, is positioned to close that gap. It holds the full set of GRA exemption records. The public does not.

A TRAIL THAT WENT QUIET

The outlet that first obtained the Royal Chicken exemption letter found, in the aftermath, that comparable records for other consortium members were no longer forthcoming. We note this not as speculation but as a documented change in access: a single leak surfaced one company’s exemption, and the channel that produced it did not produce others.

That pattern is itself part of the story. A government confident that Tacama’s feed supply was adequate, and that duty-free Brazilian imports by consortium members were incidental rather than structural, would have no reason to make the underlying exemption data harder to obtain once one instance became public.

The opacity that followed the leak is not proof of wrongdoing on its own — but it is not the behaviour of an administration eager to demonstrate that the first document was an outlier.

WHAT SHOULD HAPPEN NOW

• The Guyana Revenue Authority should publish, or make available under access-to-information request, the full register of duty and VAT exemptions granted to Tacama consortium members for feed-input imports over the past 24 months, by company, tonnage, and origin.
• New GMC and the Ministry of Agriculture should disclose the actual tonnage of soya exported to Barbados in April, and confirm whether the shipment moved on the announced timeline.
• The Ministry should account for the gap between Tacama’s reported harvest volumes and the consortium’s own import figures, so the public can judge whether the project is supplementing or substituting for imported feed.
• GPPA should disclose which of its member companies will be distributing the 330,000 pounds of weekly imported chicken now being facilitated through New GMC, given the overlap between its membership and the Tacama consortium.

The government’s own language in April promised an “ecosystem” — production, value addition, export. What the documented record now shows is a narrower and more familiar arrangement: public money underwrites the platform, a private consortium draws inputs from whichever source is cheapest in a given quarter, and when the domestic shelf runs short, the same government that funded the platform steps back in to license the import that fills it.

The public pays three times — for the infrastructure, for the shortage, and for the imported chicken that follows 

Until the Ministry of Agriculture and the Guyana Revenue Authority release the fuller record, the two documents at the centre of this report stand as the clearest public evidence yet that Tacama’s self-sufficiency narrative and its consortium’s actual sourcing practices have not been the same thing.

— The Board

SOURCES & DOCUMENTATION

1. Guyana Revenue Authority, letter to Mr. Rasheed Baksh, General Manager, Royal Chicken Inc., “Re: Tax Exemption — Royal Chicken Inc. (Raw Materials),” approving exemption for 1,500 tons soyabean meal per Commercial Invoice No. 003/2026 (Feb. 9, 2026), North Link Brazil Ltda. Signed for the Commissioner-General by Gavin Low; copied to the Comptroller of Customs, Excise & Trade Operations, the Deputy Commissioner of Law Enforcement & Investigation, and the Auditor General.
2. Guyana Customs & Excise Department, Single Administrative Document / import declaration, Lethem Branch Office, dated Jan. 26, 2026, recording 100 metric tons of crude (non-degummed) soyabean oil, exporter North Link Brazil Ltda (Boa Vista, Roraima), consignee Royal Chicken Inc. (Lot 60, Garden of Eden, East Bank Demerara), customs value GY$29,815,500.
3. “Subsidised Soya, Exported Feed, Imported Chicken,” The 592 Guardian, April 30, 2026.
4. Department of Public Information (Guyana), press release on the poultry market stabilisation measure and Minister Mustapha’s meeting with the Private Sector Commission, Aug. 11, 2026.
5. Prior Guardian and public reporting on the Tacama corn-and-soya project, consortium membership, and public infrastructure investment, 2023–2026.