Last week we spoke of the tragedy at the end of African slavery and the beginning of Indentureship (Portuguese, WI African, African, Indian and Chinese) to facilitate the survival of the sugar industry to generate profits for the planters. We alluded to Marx’s aphorism that history repeats itself as a “farce”, in light of the remarkably similar number of challenges and responses in the present.
With sugar, Europe decided to introduce mono-culture agriculture in the West Indies and ruled that it was salutary to enslave Africans to meet the demands of that inaugural “industry”. As explained last week, as their economic circumstances changed Europe decided that the “primitive accumulation” from chattel slave labour be transitioned to “free labour” – for increased profits, of course. In the West Indies, however, because of the aforementioned “demands”, bonded or “indentured” labour was now legalized as a way station.
The arguments are eerily being echoed today. The “preferential prices” for sugar the local planters received would be lost because of the removal of preferential tariffs. Labour costs would be too high because the workers (newly freed Africans) didn’t appreciate the workings of the newly created “market economy” that depended on the “invisible hand” of demand and supply. The factories and field practices that had to be retooled demanded capital infusions that had to come from lower wages from the workers (the new indentured servitude).
The descendants of the freed Africans are still grappling with the post-emancipation structural conditions imposed to herd them back onto the plantations. And the farce is that the APNU/AFC coalition government are using the same “economic argument” to deal with the present day challenges. Way back in 1999, we had critiqued the 1998 GuySuCo Strategic Plan, and advised that its operations should be consolidated and not expanded.
One reason was because we predicted the new 20th Century European “preferential prices” – contracted to last “in perpetuity” – would once again be jettisoned with their new economic circumstances – consequent to the intensified globalisation that was inaugurated with their colonisation of these same islands. We still remember debating Ian Mc Donald of GuySuCo on this point and his (poignant) refusal to believe Europe would be so cavalier and callous to do that. The eventual 36% cut in prices was announced in 2005.
Accepting the received “economic” wisdom, the government decided to follow its Plan to increase sugar production in Berbice and bring down its overall high costs (US.24 cents/lb) through mechanisation and efficiencies of scale, down to US.12cents/lb.
The second and more personal reason for our disagreement was the degrading and inhuman social relations imposed by the labour intensive nature of sugar production in Guyana. Mechanisation, we felt, would only go so far, since with our unique system of canals for drainage and irrigation, it would inevitably lead to soil compaction that would hinder ratooning and thus raise costs.
And it was for these reasons we proposed, that starting with the Demerara plantations, which were always the highest cost producers, they should be diversified from sugar. And the lands distributed to the workers to become independent farmers of crops that would be supplied to privately owned factories for processing. Ultimately if these new products were more profitable than sugar, this would be the model that could be used to move the entire industry away from monoculture plantation agriculture.
Up to now, the APNU/AFC Government has handled the increased travails of the sugar industry very badly. After deploying a Commission of Inquiry (CoI)l it seems to have placed its report in cold storage and initiated ad hoc moves that have bemused sugar workers and befuddled the Guyanese public. From its actions at Wales – which has the largest number of private cane farmers (including the largest bloc of African Guyanese cane farmers) and most ethnically diverse work force – they seem determined to repeat the actions of the sugar planters in 1834:
Which is to accept the view of workers as “capital” that can be deployed or destroyed at will in the thrust to generate profits with no consideration for the development of their own human potential. This is the farce.
