Sugar in Guyana will not die – Nagamootoo

…says estates to be used as diversification platforms

In spite of the many issues facing the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo has promised that sugar in Guyana would not die, but would work hand in hand with other sectors to ensure economic growth.

Speaking to Journalists on Friday, the Prime Minister, who is also the acting Chairman of the Alliance For Change (AFC), said some of the functions that were connected to sugar would have to be diversified in order to accommodate other activities that would earn foreign exchange and revenue. “The Skeldon factory has not performed to its expectations and from 2009 after the US$200 million had been spent on it and then some additional sums were given to South African and Indian consultants to try to correct the fault of the factory, we knew it was a limping elephant,” Nagamootoo told reporters. He said: “This elephant that we inherited was not producing sugar in accordance with what was envisaged, that it would produce sugar at break even, even if it is US15 cents per pound, not 40 cents per pound, then you could have relied on that factory that it was doing what it was built to do.”

“So what do you do with Skeldon if the factory is not performing? You would have to have methods to refurbish it for other players to come in, either to refurbish the factory, to diversify crops, to work an arrangement with private cane farmers, a combination of several things.” He said every estate that sits on lands would require a forensic study of what the lands could be utilised for and to see how to absorb existing labour and retrain the labour to fit into a new value-added chain of production. The Prime Minister said the notion that Government was seeking to shut down the sugar industry was false.

“…Sugar will remain the remit of GuySuCo. In order to save the industry, you will have to disaggregate certain functions, because it has now become oppressive to carry out the annual bailout of the sugar industry.” He said over the past five years, some $37 billion has been spent on bailouts of the industry.

“If there’s any raiding of the treasury, it is really raiding the treasury right now to pay sugar workers and I hope they would appreciate that,” Nagamootoo said.

He added that what was needed now was strong leadership to address the issue of the sugar industry, noting that sugar should not be politicised as “too much is at stake”. “Too much history of our country, too much psychological harm could be done to persons who may feel that if sugar is diversified, then their livelihood may come to an end.” Nagamootoo said the children of persons working in the industry deserve a better quality of life and a better type of employment that would place them at the higher end of the value chain than the job of the “menial mule working in the sun with a cutlass, firing chops at cane roots”. He said leaders needed to be bold and decisive on this issue and not allow politics to destroy them, because sugar has always been a critical aspect of Guyana’s foreign exchange. He said the industry has also been used as a political football, because of the peculiar nature of the constituency, its ethnic nature that has become a “fiefdom of some politicians and their sidekicks, who see sugar workers not as people who could be transformed and their future made better, but as a checkout machine where they can get union dues every month”. He said Government did not see it that way, but looked at it knowing that the transformation of sugar was vital for the people in the sugar industry and Guyana as a whole.