For two years now, the Government has been vehemently defending the highly unpopular decision it took to send home over 4, 763 sugar workers as part of its strategy for turning around the fortunes of this country’s ailing sugar industry.
The coalition Government has also been called upon time and time again to justify its decision to completely close three sugar estates while merging the others in attempt to make the industry more financially viable and cut off permanently the supply of billions of dollars in subsidies from the public purse which kept the industry afloat and alive.
Additionally, it has denied that its decision to cut off aid to the industry was political and racially motivated even though those who are most affected by the Government’s decision to a large extend hail from communities which have traditionally and solidly voted for the Peoples Progressive Party and are overwhelmingly Indian-Guyanese.
As a result, various spokespersons inside David Granger’s Government and those sympathetic to its ideologies outside, have also hailed the decision as “bold” and “necessary” because they feel that sugar was bleeding the treasury dry and GuySuCo could soon become bankrupt because it’s distressing financial status.
According to State Paper on the Future of the Sugar Industry presented to Parliament by Agriculture Minister Noel Holder GuySuCo had incurred a debt of close to $82B by 2015 while its production in 2016 had fallen by 18.7 percent. The company, according to Noel, had seen a foreign exchange earned by the crop decline by 15 percent. The Government claimed that the crisis led it to invest $32B dollars over since 2015 in the industry.
In fact, Holder’s State Paper listed a number of things to be done to save the industry as it referenced the Commission of Inquiry’s recommendation that GuySuCo be privatized over a three-year period while no effort be spared to look at other serious diversification options to end its reliance solely on sugar revenue. Holder felt that a smaller industry would be easy to manage and with the amalgamation of sugar estates at Albion-Rose Hall, Blairmont and Uitvlugt-Wales, GuySuCo could finally meet revised production and commercial targets.
His paper assumes that with the divestment of assets at the closed sugar estates and the some form of diversification activities, the industry’s prospects looked better.
Holder again rejected the suggestions by independent analysis that the Government had no plan for the industry when it embarked upon implementing the proposals in the State Paper. His Government, has ignored the voices of reason and intelligence that are crying for it to reconsider its approach to a the entire industry.
No one is against saving the industry or the policy of agricultural diversification. The PPP nor the other independent critics have never rallied against restructuring GuySuCo or reducing the subsidies spent on keeping the industry alive.
Everyone is against the manner in which the Government went about the entire process and the suspicious political plots that were concocted to sell of prime assets to people close to the industry who would then turn around invest little and make huge profits that would enrich only a small circle.
The truth is, the Holder’s state paper is biased in focus. It does not address the core problems facing the industry and does not offer a wide array of options that if explored could have seen sugar still being kept afloat at the very same scale. The Paper was anti-sugar worker from a welfare standpoint and did not contemplate the socioeconomic impact that downsizing the industry could have a unique group of people.
The Paper did not look at costs for severance, benefits and other emoluments for thousands of workers who would have likely been sent on the breadline. It failed to even suggest that drafts a strategic reemployment strategy for those skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labourers that formed the core of the industry.
It deliberately ignored the role played by sugar in shaping a modernized Guyana and adding wealth to the very treasury that the Government is now shutting to the industry. What is even more sad is the fact that it does not even reference the contributions made by Sugar to assist bauxite when it was on its death bed or the role it played when things were bad in Guyana under the rulership of former PNC regimes.
The Paper’s entire thrust appears political. Sugar could have been saved if the Paper was done by people with knowledge of the industry and people who understood the importance of restructuring without economically sabotaging those who died and toiled for a modernized Guyana.
The Government cannot be serious when it said that was the paper that outlined the future of the industry because it is unrealistic, anti-union, anti-workers and anti-development. We must change direction and change course by developing a serious strategic plan or the Government, influenced by anti-political sentiments, will run GuySuCo into the ground after sucking all of the political sweetness out of it.
Highly unpopular decision to downsize Guyana’s sugar industry
