In my concluding remarks last week, you would recall that I was very critical in my description of the State Paper on the Future of the Sugar Industry, which was presented to the National Assembly by the Minister of Agriculture about a month or so ago.
First, let me begin by presenting a definition of what a White Paper is, in the interest of the ordinary citizen to comprehend. The term ‘White Paper’ is an offshoot of the term ‘White Book’. It is an official publication of a national government which typically argues a specific position or solution to a problem. Though white papers originated in governmental policies, they have evolved into becoming a common tool used to introduce technology innovations and products.
Now, you might be wondering: what is the relevance of providing all of this information on the mere definition of a white paper? Here’s the answer: normally, a white paper produced by a firm about their product constitutes, on average, about ten pages and 3,000 words. A white paper, on the other hand, dealing with a very complex and profoundly debatable subject of national importance regarding a governmental policy ought to be a very robust piece of work. Against this background, such a White Paper should at least constitute no less than about 30 pages or 10,000 to 15,000 words. In this way, it would be reflective of the profundity of the issue and the robustness of the workings therein.
That being said, the State Paper in its original form has minimum no table of contents, no introduction or at least an Executive Summary, and it is a mere seven-page document comprising of 2600 words.
Further, if one were to examine it carefully, it would appear as though most of its contents were simply copied and pasted from various already published documents to put together such a supposedly important state paper.
The very first section of the paper carried the caption “The future of the Sugar Industry”. This section comprised only three very short paragraphs. The first paragraph made two statements or highlighted two points that are widely known – it states that “the Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc. is a wholly owned state enterprise, and instead of being self-sustaining and contribute to the revenues of the state, has encountered severe decline.” The second paragraph spoke about the declining production of the entity. The third and final paragraph under this section highlighted the amount of subsidy that the government had to provide, and the amount of debt incurred. A careful examination revealed that this is all historic information. So where is the future plan? It is ironic and hilarious that the section of the paper with the bold heading “The future of the industry” has in it not a single word or phrase mention or hint on the future direction of the state owned entity.
The next section that follows in the paper was dedicated to the evolution of the industry. Seven short paragraphs dealt with this, and I would not summarise it here because, again, these are things that were taught in school. In fact, this column presented succinctly the evolution of the industry in the very first article on this subject. So every Guyanese, I am sure, knows of the evolution of the sugar industry in Guyana. The section that follows this is captioned “Economic Challenges”. In this section, again, the known challenges were highlighted, including an acknowledgement of the fact that GuySuCo needed an urgent injection of $12 billion in 2015, and failure to act in this regard would have resulted in disastrous consequences to not only the industry, but the economy at large, since about 16,000 employees and 48,000 dependents would have been adversely affected immediately. Under this section, too, one would realise it simply regurgitated the challenges of GuySuCo. The problem with this section is that in no way was any attempt made at answering these questions: What did the management do over all those years to overcome GuySuCo’s challenges? What measures were undertaken? How and when were they implemented? What were the results? What monitoring and evaluation mechanism, if any, was put in place?
The paper made reference to the fact that the sugar industry operated largely in a protected market from 1959 to 2009. The European Union market had accounted for 50 per cent of the industry’s sugar output and 70 per cent of its revenue. Subsequently, a decision was made by the European Agriculture Council to reduce the guaranteed price for sugar by 36 per cent over a four-year period that began in 2006. The logical questions therefore are: since four years’ notice was given within which the protected market price arrangement had virtually come to an end and was gradually phased out over this period, what did policy makers do over this period to now secure new markets, enhance the efficiency of the industry, and reduce production cost through economies of scale and diversify the industry? These are all pertinent questions that ought to have been addressed in a white paper, but they were obviously omitted. (To be continued next week).
