Sugar industry facing impending collapse – Jagdeo

Estate closures

– 17,000 workers stand to loose

The current policies of Government regarding the scaling down of the sugar industry could spell its imminent collapse. This was the contention of Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo at his press conference earlier this week, where he berated the present Administration for its atrocious handling and management of a crucial industry.
“We have heard in the period immediately after the coalition Government took office, how better they were managing the sugar industry but production is all but collapsing, across the industry; the morale [of workers] is low and the industry is in a state of drift because they are not clear about the future of the industry,” Jagdeo claimed on Tuesday.
According to the Opposition Leader, Government is giving indications that closures are on the horizon.
“The Government itself seems to only be concerned about one thing – the only signal that people get is that there will be closures,” he posited.
On May 8, Agriculture Minister Noel Holder presented Government’s State paper on the future of the sugar industry to the National Assembly, where he had announced that two sugar estates would be closed and the annual production of sugar would be reduced, among a number of other measures, as part of a new policy on the sugar industry.
He had further noted that the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) would have three estates and three sugar factories; these being Blairmont on the West Bank of Berbice, Albion-Rose Hall in East Berbice and the Uitvlugt-Wales Estate in West Demerara. It was also stated that the three estates will be complete with factories and will have cane supplied from all locations, the Minister said earlier this year.
Minister Holder had also claimed that this process would result in improvements to the relationship with some cane cutters, estate staff and about 1710 private cane farmers.
Jagdeo has however once again called on Government to conduct assessments regarding how the closures could affect the sustenance of the industry, while reiterating his long held contention that social impact studies should have been carried out before Government had the Guyana Sugar Corporation scale down its operations.
“How these closures will affect the viability of the industry itself has not been determined or calculated and so what we face now is an impending catastrophe in the industry, probably an impending collapse of the entire industry because of lack of planning, lack of foresight, mixed signals, and the drift in the Government,” Jagdeo stressed on Tuesday.
“There is a policy drift in the Government that you cannot have an industry that is so critical to Guyana – not just sugar workers but Guyana’s wellbeing. It is unbelievable that a Government would have such a huge vacuum in policies relating to an industry,” the Opposition Leader highlighted.
A series of protests across the sugar belt followed the announcement of the closures. In December 2016, sugar operations ceased at the Wales Estate, leaving over 1000 workers without employment. Thousands more, their families and their community stand to suffer the consequences of more closures. Additionally, many farmers have cited financial and infrastructural challenges in attempts at crop diversification.
Additional estimates have pegged that some 17,000 more workers stand to lose out from the estate closures which could impact upon villages and families as Wales residents and workers have been claiming since the announcement of the estate’s shutdown in early 2016.