Agriculture Minister: We Wanted to Exhaust All Other Options

Jose Abelardo Mai

Although the crisis has been addressed and the mill is back in full swing, there is a school of thought that still believes that the government, particularly, the prime minister took too long to intervene in the process. Some of the cane farmers themselves have slammed Prime Minister John Briceño for not taking decisive action earlier, in order to bring an end to the impasse quicker. But Minister Mai says while people feel the government can do a lot of things, it decided to allow all other avenues to be exhausted first.

Jose Abelardo Mai, Minister of Agriculture

“The government has to weigh the options and what is the cost of using the hammer fist. There’s always a cost. You want to nationalize it, there’s a cost for that. You want to close the mill, there’s a cost for that. You want to suspend, there’s a cost for it. So government, while I believe it can do something, it has to measure what the costs are, so the Prime Minister was very cautious as to what decisions had to be made. So I don’t think that it was the eleventh hour. I think that we wanted to exhaust all our options before we did something as drastic as that. And so it was done. That’s the important thing.”