APNU/AFC’s ugly conspiracy to end sugar in Guyana

The A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) has established a sub-committee to consider a new dispensation for the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo). President Granger posited that his government is unwilling to continue providing subsidies to GuySuCo. APNU/AFC wants to consider privatisation, further closings or other options. Make no mistake, they are implementing their threat of 2014 to close sugar in Guyana. For all intent and purposes, APNU/AFC has already started the process of ending sugar. Bluntly, APNU/AFC is anti-sugar. Their closure plan was conceived in 2014 and announced at a media conference chaired by Joseph Harmon. The APNU/AFC agriculture spokesperson at the time, Anthony Vieira, announced that sugar should be closed and replaced with aquaculture to produce tilapia in 2014.
No one disputes sugar is undergoing a very difficult time in Guyana presently. Sugar is undergoing a difficult time throughout the ACP (Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific). Sugar has essentially ended in most of the Caribbean. Outside of Guyana, the only other meaningful production in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) is now in Jamaica and Belize. Privatisation in Jamaica and Belize has not improved the sugar industry. Sugar has three common problems across the entire ACP – climate change, the cost of mechanisation and the precipitous drop in export prices. The sugar industries within the ACP have not been able to respond adequately and rapidly enough to accommodate these challenges.
Climate change has particularly affected the sugar industries of countries like Guyana. The discreet cultivation and grinding seasons with well-defined rainy and dry periods no longer exist. Mechanisation is critical for the new sugar industry. The costly process of mechanisation has started in Guyana and we must complete the job. This is not only critical for greater efficiency and effectiveness, but an imperative to confront the shortage of labour that the industry has experienced. The almost instant reduction of prices for sugar by the Europeans, in the arbitrary repudiation of the 1976 sugar protocol, was a severe shock to the industry and requires time to adjust.
APNU/AFC has argued that Government cannot afford the significant “subsidies” that sugar requires in order for the industry to make the adjustments necessary. During the 2015 election campaign, the then President Donald Ramotar committed that the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) Government was willing to invest billion annually for five years to ensure sugar recovers and continue to be one of the major industries in the economic blueprint for development in Guyana. This would have allowed GuySuCo to make the adjustments required to restore the glory of sugar in our country. In the heat of the campaign and in response to the charge that APNU/AFC would close the sugar industry, as they had vowed in 2014, Granger, Nagamootoo, Ramjattan and other leaders of APNU/AFC promised they will make the investment because “sugar was too big to fail”.
In distancing themselves from the 2014 proposal to close sugar and replaced it with tilapia cultivation, they promised to restore sugar to its glory days and that in their economic plan for Guyana, sugar remained the undisputed king. There are newspaper accounts, there are video tapes of APNU/AFC leaders making promises to keep ‘KING SUGAR’ as one of the major industries in Guyana, including making the investments necessary. In presenting their case, they promised the sugar workers an annual 20 per cent wages increase. The workers and the people of Guyana have been betrayed because sugar workers have been denied any wages increase in both 2015 and 2016 and now APNU/AFC has started the process of ending sugar, just as they vowed in 2014.
The “subsidies” required are indeed substantial, but are not charity to GuySuCo. Sugar subsidised Guyana for decades under the People’s National Congress and today with the restoration of the EU budget support, the subsidies to sugar is really returning the earnings of sugar to the industry at a time when it most needs it. It is the reason why as Agriculture Minister I hesitated to ask for subsidies. Rather. I always requested that Guyana repays GuySuCo what was due to it. I made sure that payment to GuySuCo recognised that the EU budget support was a compensation for the arbitrary repudiation of the 1976 sugar protocol.
APNU/AFC’s plan to close sugar because Guyana cannot afford the “subsidies” is repugnant. For almost 25 years, Guyana has subsidised Linden with billion annually for electricity. This is a subsidy that goes directly to each citizen. Instead of the approximately per kilowatt hour of electricity, people in Linden pay almost nothing. The Government subsidy pays the electricity bill. When the PPP attempted to remove the subsidy in a phase manner to allow Lindeners to pay the same as every other Guyanese citizen APNU/AFC instigated a riot. How come “subsidies” for an industry that is too big to fail is too much for APNU/AFC to support, but it is an obligation to keep subsidising electricity in Linden? (Send comments to [email protected])