The PPP/C had committed to reopening the estates that were unilaterally shuttered by the APNU/AFC Government and upon assuming office on August 2, 2020 immediately “put their money where their mouth was”. Rose Hall is up and running, and steps have already been initiated to reopen Skeldon Estate. Wales is well on its way to being the centre of our upstream Oil & Gas industrialisation thrust while Enmore has benefited from the increased development on the East Coast Demerara (ECD) corridor. But if the plan to make the sugar industry profitable once again is to be successful, there first will have to be a plan. A holistic one, that looks in a hardnosed fashion at where the industry is, where the Board of Directors want it to be, and most importantly, exactly what they expect the management team to do to get from here to there.
Towards that end, we offer some suggestions. First of all, we believe that the sugar plantations can be made viable within a regime that more clearly articulates the de facto change in strategy from a sugar industry to a sugarcane industry. The change is more than semantic. At the most mundane level, it stresses the fact that all the touted end products – sugar (bulk and packaged; raw and refined); electricity; alcohol; ethanol; paper; etc – depend on sugar cane being supplied and, therefore, its production must be given the central role in any future strategy.
One area that has to be looked at is the recruitment practices for field management: Field Manager; Senior Field Manager and assistant field mgr. (harvesting); asst. field mgr. (crop husbandry); asst. field mgr. (mechanical tillage); Agri. Superintendent (Agronomist); asst. field mgr. (cultivation); field workshop superintendent; field superintendent; supervisors (one for each gang); field foremen and charge-hands. Recently, GuySuCo has had great difficulty in recruiting and retaining managers from the field superintendent level and upwards.
This will remain a problem if upper management continues to insist on “book qualifications” being the main criteria for recruitment. These individuals retain the ingrained West Indian aversion to being connected to manual labour and basically see themselves “catching their hand” until they locate greener (white-collar) pastures. They avoid the fields like the plague. The focus ought to shift towards promoting individuals upwards from the supervisors’ category, who started as ordinary workers and who will more likely remain for the status conferred by the positions. They ought to be trained in the use of the now available hand-held computerised devices that allow the complicated flow of field operations to be monitored and evaluated daily.
In addition to the above-mentioned product mix from sugar cane, we suggest that the production of biogas be made standard at all sugar factories. Molasses and bagasse are not the only waste products in the production of sugar from sugar cane – the wash and press mud are extremely rich in methane or bio-gas – which can be extracted and bottled for commercial sale or for providing fuel to the fleet of vehicles used in sugar cane cultivation. The vehicles would have to be slightly modified.
The generation of electricity from bagasse ought to be seen not simply as a subsidiary operation from the production of sugar, but as an economic enterprise on its own merits. Mauritius embarked on this road since the mid-eighties and most of its factories now have co-generation capabilities that provide 44 per cent (or 750 Gigawatt hours (GWh)) of electricity to their grid of which 21 per cent (or 360 GWh) is from bagasse. For the Berbice plantations, the co-generation potential would be augmented if the four factories in Berbice consolidated their co-generation plants. If power generation is evaluated from its own capabilities, some of the Type III lands in Uitvlugt in Demerara that give such poor yields for sugar cane could be converted into fuel cane that is not only hardier but generates more fibre and thus more energy in power generation. Unlike the sugar cane, the fuel cane can also be harvested in sub-optimum weather since sunlight to maximise sucrose content is not a factor: the number of available days in the wetter Demerara plantations could then be increased, lowering unit costs.
