With our new “crisis a week” norm, the sugar industry’s crisis has been pushed off the front pages of the newspapers but the contradictions precipitated by the Government’s actions to “save” the industry have intensified and may soon explode like an unattended sore. It has been almost two years since this newspaper uncovered that Wales Estate was going to be shuttered and eight months since it actually was.
Five months after that precipitate action, the Government unveiled its “State Paper on the Future of the Sugar Industry” which announced: “The proposed courses of action are to amalgamate Wales Estate with Uitvlugt Estate and reassign its cane to the Uitvlugt factory, since the estate is operating at 50 per cent capacity. Sixty per cent of its drainage and irrigation infrastructure is in a dilapidated condition. The Corporation furthermore seeks to divest itself of the Skeldon Estate. The estates of Albion and Rose Hall are to be amalgamated and the factory at Rose Hall is to be closed.”
The plan added, seemingly as an afterthought, “In the case of Enmore, that factory will be closed at the end of the year when all cane would have been harvested and the East Coast Estates would be earmarked for diversification.” After the bloodletting, the Guyana sugar industry, run by the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), would consist of three estates and three sugar factories: Blairmont on the West Bank Berbice, Albion-Rose Hall in East Berbice and the Uitvlugt-Wales estate in West Demerara. They are expected to produce a total of 147,000 tonnes annually; less than half of its historic average production.
But we can look at what has played out at Wales Estate, since its closure as part of the “amalgamation” with Uitvlugt Estate, twenty-two miles away, as a precursor as to what lies ahead for the other estates to be closed or ‘amalgamated”. There, approximately 1200 of the workers were offered and accepted “severance pay” for their termination of services. Three hundred and fifty canecutters are being coerced to transfer to Uitvlugt against their will and the law.
Most Guyanese are unaware of the quantum of the severance pay to appreciate a family cannot long survive on it. For an average worker who might have accumulated, say, 15 years of service, this pay would amount to 30 weeks of their average weekly wage. What this means is that by now, if the Wales dismissed workers were very disciplined and prudent and stuck to a budget, their severance pay would have been exhausted by now. What are they to do henceforth?
The State Paper promises: “Employees are to be leased land by GuySuCo to engage in crops (crop types to be decided by GuySuCo and the Agriculture Ministry).” This signalled that the Government was going to transition sugar workers into farmers, which would be a very positive and salutary measure. But up this point at Wales, no employee has been leased any of the approximately 8000 acres of land that had been cultivated by the estate. It would appear that, as was the case with the closure of Wales long before a “State Paper” was articulated, the modalities of leasing of lands to former workers – if in fact the Government is serious about that move – is yet to be worked out.
In the meantime, GuySuCo announced it had converted some 400 acres of land at Wales to produce “seed paddy” that would be sold to rice farmers at the beginning of their crop. This is not adding any new production or employment in Guyana since all seed paddy needed for the industry has been supplied by National Agricultural Research and Extension Institute (NAREI) and private contracted farmers. Because of the purity of seeds needed, seed paddy demands a level of care that is unlikely to be supplied by the inexperienced workers at Wales.
What is then clear is after the closure of all sugar operations at Enmore/LBI and the other locations identified, at least 10,000 workers and their families will be on the breadlines in an economy that is contracting. Tragic.
