Dear Editor,
Job loss (which is really unemployment) and natural unemployment (like when people just do not want to work) are inextricably linked to crimes of all sorts and to drugs (abuse especially). I think no one would argue against this connection, and many papers have been written along this line. So, as expected, to now learn that the “Enmore Sugar Estate will become (the) hub for employment on ECD” is indeed quite refreshing.
The news is that there are some major plans for the Enmore Sugar Estate to be transformed to serve as an employment hub for the East Coast of Demerara (ECD). Let us remember that A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) had shut down this Estate, plunging many into despair, and eventual wastefulness of their lives.
If all goes well, according to Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, “the Government was mulling a large-scale industrial complex at Enmore that would go beyond sugar production.”
“We just had, a couple weeks ago, a discussion on the entire masterplan for five years of turning around sugar. It would involve a number of things, including packaging more processed sugar. We’d have to make a determination between Enmore, because Enmore and other areas are slated for industrial development too.”
To be honest, I really don’t care where, so long as we can find employment for the many who were so cruelly dislocated when Enmore was shut down. In the minds of the planners, this development is not “necessarily just sugar-related, but to absorb employment that people lost jobs. So, we’re looking to Enmore for a broader-scale industrial (complex) that would employ people from the East Coast. East Coast, parts of Region Five. To shift more employment into the lower areas, Haslington, Golden Grove, all of these areas, Cove and John, Foulis.”
This kind of national mind-set must be commended and welcomed.
Regards,
Baldeo Mathura
