The anguish of the 5700 sugar workers thrown into the breadlines in the last year has begun to inevitably manifest itself into social pathologies, such as suicide, domestic violence, divorce, depression, alcohol and drug abuse etc. The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) has only now announced it will introduce counselling services to the fired workers and their families: but this is dealing with the symptom and not the disease.
The disease denies a job to a demographic whose self-worth is intimately related to their ability to take care of their responsibilities, primarily supporting their families financially. Any effective and sustainable intervention to the sugar catastrophe must provide employment to the fired workers. But especially in Berbice and West Bank Demerara where 5000 of the 5700 fired workers are located, at the very best, it will take years to create new employment.
What has made the recent posturing of the Government and GuySuCo even more callous is there has been no dearth of proposals to provide alternatives even before the imminent closure of Wales was exposed by this newspaper in December 2015. Speaking at the Indian Arrival Day commemoration in May 2015, Prime Minister Designate, Moses Nagamootoo, declared:
“Our ancestors worked very hard and today we still have their descendants on the sugar estate working very hard and of course they deserve to reap the contributions made by their ancestors and they don’t need to be afraid that the factory may be closed and that they may be out of jobs. They need to be guaranteed that even if there is factory closure on the sugar estates that the land must first go to the sugar workers. Let them choose if they want to grow cane on it, let them choose if they want to rear fish on it or they want to rear cattle on it. The land belongs to the ancestors of our Indian foreparents who worked in the sugar industry…”
This devolution of sugar lands to sugar workers had long been proposed to address the historic travails of sugar workers. In 1951, Arthur Lewis, who was to awarded the Nobel prize in Economics for his contribution to Developmental Economics, issued a pamphlet, “Issues in land Settlement”: New forms of organisation must be tried and tried urgently. In Puerto Rico, the Government has shown itself alive to the fact, and is greatly to be praised for taking the initiative in experimenting with the “Proportional Profit Farm”. In the British territories, on the other hand, governments are content to meet a succession of disturbances with a succession of commission of inquiries.
This is not good enough… New forms must be created which will take the West Indian sugar industry “out of politics” in the sense of earning general acceptance, or the West Indian community will sooner or later simply tear itself into pieces and destroy the sugar industry in the process.”
Lewis pointed to the experience of Fiji in organising a more viable sugar industry which was at the same time much more humane in its involvement of labour to ensure they received a better life, by facilitating the workers to become farmers: “Some people believe that this is the system which will eventually supply the West Indies with a solution to the problems of its sugar industry. A large-scale agency will plough the land, control irrigation, supply seedlings and fertilisers, organise harvesting, and operate factories while peasants (small farmers) will plant and cultivate the crop on their own account, subject to charges for services performed.
The peasants (farmers) will have a representative Council, but this will not take over the functions of the agency. In Fiji and the Sudan, the agency has been a private company, but it might equally be a public corporation, as it is now to be in the Sudan.”
In February 2016, after Government reneged on its pre-election promise on sugar, a symposium at Moray House proposed an identical model to the Lewis proposal. Yet the Government has remained silent. Why?
