This week is the 69th anniversary of the Enmore Resistance and the Enmore Martyrs. Sadly, on this most important anniversary, one that started the journey to independence, sugar workers are again fighting for their welfare and to defend our democracy.
Across Guyana, including in Enmore, sugar workers and their families and other citizens are resisting closure of sugar estates and the closure of sugar. As sugar workers lead the resistance, like they did in 1948 and for more than one hundred years before that, their fears go beyond their families. In fact, their fears are about the economic and social welfare of our country.
Even as A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) is relentless in closing estates and putting 10,000 sugar workers out of a job and even as they get closer to closure of sugar, they also continue their assault on rice, another backbone of the economy of Guyana. Many rice farmers have abandoned their rice fields.
Some small farmers are renting their rice fields at low rental rates to bigger farmers because the small farmers cannot survive with APNU/AFC’s anti-rice policies. There has been no new market for rice, in spite of the continued promise that a large Mexican market is on the horizon. At the end of 2014, there were 35 markets for Guyana’s rice.
At this time, we still have the same 35 markets, with the only change being that the Venezuelan market has dramatically collapsed. This week rice farmers in the Essequibo islands complained that they are still owed money for paddy they sold to millers since last year. The Government has been non-responsive.
The APNU/AFC’s position is that the farmers’ sale of paddy to millers constitute private transactions. This is true, but under the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the farmers were facilitated. While the PPP threatened millers with the Rice Factory Act through which their licences could be terminated, the PPP always worked with farmers and millers to ensure farmers were paid. Often, that meant that the Government advanced money to the farmers until the millers exported rice and repaid the Government. In addition, the PPP worked with farmers and millers to ensure that farmers were paid a fair price for their paddy. Yet, farmers thought that the PPP could have done even more.
APNU/AFC seized the opportunity and promised rice farmers they will meet their demands, ensure that farmers are paid on time and guaranteed farmers $9000 per bag of paddy. But today, APNU/AFC has abandoned and betrayed the farmers. Farmers are at the mercy of millers and today receive less than $2000 per bag of paddy. Adding salt to open wounds, APNU/AFC has increased leased and rental payments, removed waivers on Value Added Tax (VAT) and other taxes for equipment and supplies in the rice industry and provide no support to farmers during inclement weather. In drought or flood circumstances, APNU/AFC is often missing in action. Right at this moment in Region Two, Essequibo (Pomeroon-Supenaam), rice fields are flooded and Minister Holder and the Agriculture Ministry are missing. No Government agency has responded. But their non-response to the rice farmers whose fields have been flooded out is their modus operandi since May 2015.
It is truly baffling, outrageous, unfathomable, just plain bizarre behaviour. Killing sugar and rice kills the economy of Guyana. If APNU/AFC succeeds in killing rice and sugar, and they are doing an excellent job this far, Guyana will be a failed State and we will return to the days when more than 80 per cent of our people lived in poverty. Oil will not save us.
It is not that other industries do not contribute significantly to the economy and the social welfare of our people, it is that no industry supports as much employment and related economic activities as sugar and rice. Sugar and rice directly support about 35,000 jobs and with related employment more than 60,000 jobs. Sugar workers, rice farmers and those employed from related economic activities and their families account for about 200,000 people, almost 33 per cent of the entire Guyanese population. In terms of direct input into the economy, more than $70 billion annually is invested. No other industry comes close.
Why is APNU/AFC so determined to kill rice and sugar? It is part of a burgeoning insanity, based on their bizarre, obsessive hate of the PPP. They believe that by killing rice and sugar, they will permanently maim the PPP. But killing rice and sugar will affect our country and ALL the PEOPLE. It is why sugar workers, rice farmers and their families and all sensible Guyanese are resisting this insanity and why the PPP is getting stronger.
