However, there are a number of areas which the Minister of Public Works & Communications, the Agriculture Minister and other stakeholders, including the Traffic Department of the Guyana Police Force, as well as the Guyana Rice Producers Association, should address urgently.

These can be summarized as follows:

* It is necessary to sensitize rice farmers in particular, to those factors that operate in the utilization of highways along sections of the East Demerara and Berbice as well as West Demerara and the Essequibo Coast.

* The transport economics and road-users’ practices normally associated with farm to market, or access roads, where farmers would move tractor-drawn trailers loaded with paddy or rice, are qualitatively different to the same procedures on the newly constructed highways; and even other roadways built some years ago.

* Irrespective of the time of day, either pre-dawn or after dark, highways leading to Charity, Parika and Anna Regina, demand a different discipline, a different culture to that linked to farm, to double-laned, or treble-laned roads.

Bhagan Lall’s horrible accident at Sparta public road on the Essequibo Coast on Tuesday September 19, occurred because there was no reliable person on the trailer who could have warned him or alerted him as to vehicular traffic behind. The truck laden with rice that slammed into his tractor was not at fault as Lall had made a 90 degree turn onto a dam into the path of the truck.

The authorities in the rice sector must therefore, occupy themselves with resolving this problem which is associated with increased productivity and the paddy-drying schedules. To assert that one or the other vehicle was “speeding” does not provide answers.

Mr. Editor, you may be aware that there have been calls made by road users to ban tractors with trailers from traveling along the highways, with the fast and overtaking lanes posing real risks to agricultural transportation. The problem is that such a move would severely affect crop harvesting and production will eventually decline.

As an alternative the following suggestions should be examined.

* All tractors that emerge from field or pasturing activities with cage-wheel attachments (dry or wet season) must be fitted out with cleaning materials to ensure that the mud debris is not splashed across the road surface.

* All tractors with trailers should be operated by a driver with some years of experience. Also, a traffic indicator must be placed on the trailer and be operated by the driver.

* All agricultural machinery using the highway (however temporary) must be equipped with reflector and/or neon tape, also the operator should be required to wear seat – belts.

* All disc-plough and irrigation extensions used by the tractors in the field must be dismantled and loaded onto a separate vehicle and not “towed” to some other location or mill etc.

Bhagan Lall was a regular guy who never expected that his brief work assignment would result in such a terrible accident.

It is entirely appropriate therefore for me to solicit from Mr Jordan the steps that were adopted by the political party for which he speaks, to change the original name from People’s National Congress (PNC) to People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R) and later People’s National Congress/Reform-One Guyana (PNC/R-1G). It is also pertinent to note that this laughable name-changing may never end.

Changing one’s name is never a flippant fancy as Mr Jordan is well aware and therefore I would like to know what formal steps were taken to have occasioned the changes. I ask for this information as a concerned former Assistant General Secretary of the People’s National Congress.