GuySuCo’s turnaround plan which was in plain sight all along

Dear Editor,
Do you recall the GuySuCo Turnaround Plan which was introduced and implemented under the PPP back in 2010? By 2015, we recognized that the plan was sound, but we also realized the need for improvement in implementation. The 2015 production and performance of GuySuCo was evidence that we were in the right trajectory and that the 2020 goals and targets were realizable.
It was therefore unfathomable that APNU+AFC, using the Clive Thomas-led GuySuCo Board, unceremoniously dumped the plan and treated it as a secret, even as the GuySuCo CoI adopted many of the elements of the Turnaround Plan.
But I was intrigued, the other day, listening to the plans that Mr. Heath-London, the Head of NICIL and the Special Purpose Agency (SPA) established for the down-sizing and privatization of GuySuCo, outlined on the use of $30 billion that the SPA is borrowing on behalf of GuySuCo for improving production.
Even though skimpy on details, the plans for the expenditure of $30 billion appear to have been taken wholly and fully from the GuySuCo Turnaround Plan that the PPP had developed and was implementing, and that was abandoned by APNU+AFC. While I continue to worry over APNU+AFC’s total lack of commitment to a strong sugar industry, I am cautiously supportive of the SPA’s $30 billion programme.
I confess encouragement that Heath- London had discovered a plan that APNU+AFC, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Clive Thomas-led GuySuCo Board treated variously as a mystery, a plan that never existed, or a secret plan.
In fact, this secret was always in plain sight while in possession of the Ministry of Agriculture, the Board and the Government, and the media. The Turnaround Plan was always in plain sight; ignored, but never a secret. That the Clive Thomas-led Board and APNU+AFC abandoned the Turnaround Plan when there was sufficient evidence that it was sound and working testifies to a Government that is at best clueless in the management of sugar; or worse, reckless and malicious. It is to Heath-London’s credit that he recognized the efficacy of the PPP Turnaround Plan for GuySuCo.
If indeed APNU+AFC allows the SPA/NICIL to use the $30 billion to resume implementation of the PPP Turnaround Plan for GuySuCo, then there is hope for sugar. Conversion of the fields to support mechanization; full mechanization in the fields and factories; improved agriculture practices; greater participation of private farmers in the agriculture component; diversification of the products, including production of energy and packaged and processed sugar, are important elements of a successful GuySuCo. Noteworthy in the Turnaround Plan’s diversification approach was a diversification of sugar products, not an introduction of non-sugar commodities.
In addition, the PPP’s Turnaround Plan was a deliberate and purposeful plan to reform the industry, shifting from a sugar industry to a sugar cane industry producing products that include sugar, but also using the bagasse and other parts of the cane plant. These were already elements being implemented, and that was torpedoed by APNU+AFC in 2015.
Heath-London’s SPA/NICIL $30 billion influx into GuySuCo to resume the pre-2015 plans follows a series of confusing moves by the Clive Thomas-led GuySuCo Board with the full complicity of APNU+AFC, spending $32 billion without telling the nation how the money was spent. While spending this $32 billion, that board ended up foolishly closing four sugar estates, laying off more than 7,000 sugar workers, and production plunged from 234,000 tons of sugar in 2015 to 138,000 tons in 2017, a 42% reduction.
The Clive Thomas-led Board, the Ministry of Agriculture, and APNU+AFC had asserted that further subsidies to GuySuCo was throwing good money on a waste product, a “dead horse”, and was gross dereliction of duty. Now they have a dilemma — they must tell the nation why this “dead horse” can be brought alive with $30 billion.
Reading between the lines, the SPA is saying the $30 billion is to resume the PPP Turnaround Plan that APNU+AFC and the Clive Thomas-led Board abandoned.
Not only are the Government borrowing an additional $30 billion, secured with NICIL assets, to invest in the three remaining estates — Albion, Blairmont and Uitvlugt – they are also temporarily resuming operation of three of the closed estates because they need to offer operational factories in their privatization move and because they discovered that DDL, the producer of Guyana’s world-renowned rum, requires molasses for its effective operation.
GAWU/NAACIE, the PPP, I and others had told them all of this before they closed any estate. We knew, and we articulated plans to improve all the estates, and that is why the PPP had committed $20 billion annually to ensure the full and effective implementation of the GuySuCo Turnaround Plan in its 2015 election manifesto. We told them, and their own CoI had warned them, that closing estates was unwise, not supported by facts, and was reckless.
An example of the confused, clueless approach is the shifting of responsibility for sugar from the Ministry of Agriculture to the SPA/NICIL. It was a reckless move to remove all responsibility from Agriculture.
To make matters worse, at this time — in the midst of the confusion and cluelessness — the situation is clearly compounded by a power struggle between a Clive Thomas-led Board and an SPA/NICIL-led Board.

This power struggle appears to have the Ministry of Agriculture in limbo. One day it is in charge, and the next day it is not in charge. The poor Minister of Agriculture is being treated like ping-pong.
There is another truth, however, that we must not ignore: the Minister of Agriculture has been a bystander, a rubber stamp, from day one. He was never in charge, and he acts only in accordance with instructions from higher authorities. As the Minister stares clueless into the heavens, Clive Thomas asserts that he is still Chairman, Health-London has published the profiles of the new Board, and Joe Harmon has announced that the matter is still before Cabinet. Who is really in charge?
Now, as we try to decipher who really is in charge of GuySuCo and sugar, there is report that the shift of responsibility for sugar from the Ministry of Agriculture to the Special Purpose Unit (SPA) in NICIL, with an entirely new Board to manage sugar, is about to be reversed, shifting sugar back under the control of the Ministry of Agriculture.
FITUG/GTUC deems the back and forth madness and the indecisiveness as hopscotching. FITUG/GTUC is right, but far too generous. APNU+AFC are clueless. Clueless is bad enough, but they are also reckless and malicious. In any other jurisdiction, this Government would have been impeached.

Regards,
Leslie Ramsammy