Jagdeo should be living in jail for Skeldon factory

Mar 31, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
In the Stabroek News of March 29th 2015 there is an article entitled “Sugar Industry’s problems bigger then Skeldon”. It’s the only thing in this entire report which Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo said at Freedom House on 28th March 2015, I agreed on.
Like the media, Mr. Jagdeo keep harping on the Skeldon factory being a failure. Actually that is not strictly factual. The problem is that he bought a factory with a 350 ton-an-hour mill, when there was a 100-ton-a-hour mill at Skeldon and the supply of cane had to be increased from 2400 tons of cane per day to nearly 8500 tonnes per day. We had told him that it cannot be done, and it has now been established that it cannot be done.
Also it seemed to have completely escaped the attention of everyone that the labour force in the industry was dwindling rapidly, since it was 28,000 in 1992 and it had dropped to 16,000 by 2001. Let’s understand this- the PPP gets their major support from the sugar and rice areas… they keep attacking the Opposition about anything we say about the sugar industry, since they want to keep their support in the sugar belt. How did they reduce the workforce from 28000 to 16000 in 9 years without paying one cent in severance or any other type of compensation to them?
If these are the facts, and they are, then one can easily conclude that the PPP has done irreparable harm to the industry and have reduced the number of persons working in it by 57 percent in the first 10 years after they got into power. And in March of 2015, Jagdeo is telling me “what do we do? Do we get out of sugar? If we get out the entire Berbice region… almost everyone will be affected so we have to find a way”.
It completely escapes him that he has already gotten rid of 57% of the industry’s workforce and their families. Apparently if you are a sugar worker in Demerara, according to this statement, you are not really part of the sugar industry. Its not just a slip of the mouth, Editor, it’s the way he thinks. It seems as if Berbice is their sacred cow and the betrayals there have been just as vile as in the bauxite and rice areas.
In addition, and more importantly, to begin an expansion like this given that the EU had announced that they were going to remove the subsidy of our sugar by more than 30%, starting in 2006, and we still went ahead with this foolhardy expansion project is unbelievable, I still can’t believe it. That they went out and bought the worst factory on the face of the earth is irrelevant, it would have failed even if they had bought the best factory on the planet. It was Jagdeo who decided not to buy the factory from Walchandnagar in India and instead to buy it through a Chinese contracting company which did not manufacture factories and which did not have a track record in building sugar cane mills.
Mr Editor Walchandnagar Industries Limited [WIL] was going to supply the factory, turnkey, for US$35M less than the Chinese and I will insert a quote here from the Wikipedia dictionary about this company: “WIL manufactures, in  addition to sugar mills, heavy engineering products and machinery, and provides EPC and turnkey project services”.
For the energy industry, WIL manufactures boilers and machinery for thermal power plants. It also provides turnkey services for setting up thermal and biomass fueled power plants. WIL also manufactures components for the nuclear power industry. The systems for the steam turbines integrated with the nuclear reactor of India’s first indigenously developed Arihant class submarines were supplied by Walchandnagar Industries.
In the Aerospace sector, WIL supplies flight motor casings, nozzles, heat shields, etc. for various stages of space launch vehicles and has supplied critical components for India’s first moon mission CHANDRAYAAN-I and Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program, Agni V. For the defense industry, WIL supplies titanium alloy and specialized metals products, including mobile bridges, missile casings, missile launchers. WIL also provides offshore platforms, drilling rigs, etc. for oil and gas exploration and extraction”.
This company told this man Jagdeo that they had built 40 of the 350-tons-per-hour sugar cane factories and expanded 40 more to that capacity and he disregarded it… he should not be living in a mansion… he should be living in prison.
The newspaper article quotes him as saying he needs new varieties and increased productivity and that the industry needs to be revamped. Well, my question is who is going to revamp it? That wood he calls a board?
He says that the government was prepared to work on it and support it like they did the bauxite communities. Could he be referring to the same communities which he sold out to the Russians and the Chinese? That people had to die and face bullets to get him and the PPP to see sense? I could be wrong but it is my opinion that the government just passed on the problems of the bauxite industry to private owners and not Americans and Canadians. They passed it on to the Russians and the Chinese whose poor track record with regards their work force is legendary.
I will close with this stupidity from GuySuCo. On Friday, 27th March 2015, they announced that they will soon going to submit to the public a revised 2014 -2107 business plan. This is the beginning of 2015 and they already have to revise their original plan less than one year after they submitted it. This is the fourth time we have seen this 2014 plan revised.
Who do these people think we are? Here is my prediction on May 11th…the new GuySuCo plan will be obsolete, as have all of their plans been to date, but by June 31st we will present the nation with a workable plan, which will make sense and provide security for the sugar workers.
Tony Vieira

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