Govt awaiting valuation to decide lands for fired workers – Harmon

Promise of land

Plans to lease lands belonging to the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) to its thousands of retrenched workers who are now on the breadline have been put on hold pending the completion of ongoing valuation of the corporation’s assets.
Since Government’s announcement that several estates will be closed, there have been widespread calls for the sugar lands to be distributed among the displaced workers in order for them to sustain themselves and their families.
However, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon, told reporters at Friday’s post-Cabinet press briefing that a decision will be made on the distribution of sugar lands after the completion of valuation by United Kingdom-based PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
“We have retained PwC to do an assessment of GuySuCo’s assets, and so PricewaterhouseCoopers has started working on a full survey of all of GuySuCo’s assets, including the lands; and once that is done, then we will be in a better position to determine who will get what, and how much of it they will get. We have to have a clear valuation of these things as well, so we can’t just say, ‘You take this and you take that’. It has to be done in a structured way,” the Government spokesperson explained.
Harmon said he was part of a Government delegation that had met with workers attached to the Wales Estate, and they had requested lands to do farming activities so as to sustain their livelihood and that of their families.
Harmon had last year stated that Government is looking to utilise the acres of land owned by GuySuCo — that are no longer being used by the downsized industry — for a massive housing project that the State is embarking on.
“One of the option that is available is for us to look at lands that had been used by GuySuCo that are no longer being planted with cane – for us to utilise those lands as well for housing and other forms of development,” he told reporters.
The sugar corporation had, in 2016, advertised for sale several acres of land, including vacant properties at Ogle, East Coast Demerara (ECD), where its headquarters are situated. In its tender, GuySuCo had said it was looking to sell portions of its transported freehold lands situated at Mandela Avenue, Georgetown and at Liliendaal and Ogle, on the East Coast of Demerara (ECD).
GuySuCo had, in 2015, sold to the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) some 3000 acres of cane lands situated between Sophia and Ogle, ECD.
Government had previously communicated its intention to use acres of land owned by GuySuCo for housing projects and other forms of development.
According to reports in sections of the media, GuySuCo had used part of the money it received to pay its debt to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS).
Meanwhile, as it relates to the future of the sugar industry – with the three estates – Minister Harmon has posited that the GuySuCo management and Board as currently configured will have to be restructured.
“Already we know that there’s been some changes at the level of the management, as the CEO, Mr (Errol) Hanoman, has left, and so there’re actually changes that are taking place. At the level of Cabinet, we are awaiting information that will allow for a decision to be made as to how the board will be structured, how the management of the three estates of GuySuCo will be structured… These are matters that are engaging the attention of Cabinet,” he noted.