Sustaining sugar in Demerara

Dec 07, 2008 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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The inquiry into the precipitous fall in the production figures of the East Demerara plantations has been handed over to the Minister of Agriculture.

While the details have not been released, his initial reaction appears to have confirmed earlier suspicions that management’s neglect of the fundamentals of sugar cane cultivation is a major source of the shortfall.

If examined, the figures of the West Demerara plantations will be just as sorry and the reasons just as mundane.

Combined with the unfortunate failure of the Chinese contractors to successfully commission the new Skeldon factory, and the unbelievable decision to have dismantled the old factory before the tests on the new one were successful, the year will be a disastrous one for the sugar industry.

Not so incidentally, those who are still cavilling at the costs of the Skeldon expansion should be reminded of their deafening silence when the draconian levy was imposed on the sugar industry to first fund an ill conceived “import substitution industrialisation” (ISI) drive and later to subsidise other sectors of the economy.

The levy, which drained the industry of funds for its rehabilitation and rationalisation, in its very first year (1974) could have funded two Skeldons.

We were told that the money was to produce hydroelectricity in Mazaruni: all that we received, especially sugar workers, in the local parlance, was real “hydro”.

This year’s red ink, spread all over the bottom line, will bring greater scrutiny to the Demerara operations. As we pointed out last week, while the administration was able to fend off the World Bank’s insistence that the entire sugar industry be privatised, the Bank has adopted an implacable position: if by the time the Skeldon factory comes on stream the Demerara operations do not show a profit on their own, they would have to be closed. GuySuCo’s historical methodology of treating the industry as a unit is rejected as “cross subsidisation”.

Believing that the administration would not be able to fend off the World Bank, we had argued early on that the Government ought to consider divvying up the Demerara land to the workers and diversifying into other crops more suitable for its peculiar soils.

While the administration has commendably not knuckled under, we wonder if the Demerara plantations were not given baskets to fetch water. In a recent interview, the CEO of GuySuCo remarked that after the 2005 floods, the corporation has to get back to the Agricultural Improvement Program (AIP), which was unveiled since 2002. Get back?

In 2008? The question I believe the Minister should also inquire into is whether the AIP was ever implemented in the Demerara plantations. Do the spending figures support the claims?

The success or failure of GuySuCo depends on its performance in the fields: productivity of sugar in general, and the Demerara plantations in particular, will always demand rigorous husbandry practices.

The move to create a new position of Deputy CEO for a Field Specialist is a move in the right direction but we believe that it is not enough to produce the optimum results. The Board of Directors for GuySuCo is appointed by the Minister and sets policy for the corporation.

We believe that while the incumbents may have performed as well as they could under the present guidelines, the latter ought to be reconstituted to produce a much more hands-on Board, with members who have actual experience in the industry – especially in the field sector.

The present Board meets maybe monthly and as far as we are aware, none of the committees that it has constituted itself into, deals with operational matters.

We suspect that even if it did, because of the members’ general lack of exposure to the unique exigencies of producing sugar – especially the preponderant (70%) agricultural component, a whole lot of BS has been shovelled their way by management with them being none the wiser.

They would have to be willing to get into the trenches, to finally act as if they represent the owners of GuySuCo – the people of Guyana. Of course, they would have to be remunerated appropriately.

Another area that has to be looked at is the recruitment practices for the field management: Field Manager, Senior Field Manager, asst. field mgr. (harvesting), asst. field mgr. (crop husbandry), asst. field mgr. (mechanical tillage), Agri. Superintendent (Agronomist), asst. field mgr. (cultivation), field workshop superintendent, field superintendent, supervisors (one for each gang), field foremen, charge-hands.

Of recent, GuySuCo has had great difficulty in recruiting and retaining managers from the field superintendent level. This will remain a problem if upper management continue to insist on “book qualifications” being the main criteria for recruitment.

These individuals retain the ingrained West Indian aversion to be connected to manual labour and basically see themselves “catching their hand” until they locate greener (white collar) pastures.

They avoid the fields like the plague. The focus ought to shift towards promoting individuals upwards from the supervisors’ category, who started as ordinary workers and who will more likely remain for the status conferred by the positions.

They ought to be trained in the use of the now available hand-held computerised devices that allow the complicated flow of field operations to be monitored and evaluated daily.

Because the soils in Demerara have the least amount of the preferred Type I soil for sugar cultivation, for the yield to be improved to match the Berbice figures, the necessary material inputs, as well as the intensive labour for their applications, will inevitably add substantially to costs.

To retain workers in the face of job competition in Demerara, cost cutting will also have to be pursued outside the “slashing wages” box.

It appears that the administration is following a strategy in which, while remaining with sugar cane as the crop, “profitability” does not only have to come solely from the “sugar” operations.

At Enmore, the administration has used the first tranche of funds allocated by the EU to improve the productivity of the industry to initiate a modern packaging plant that will produce the packaged, high valued branded sugars such as “Genuine Demerara Gold”.

We hope that this investment, outside of the Berbice operations, signals a renewed refusal to the World Bank, to close the Demerara plantations.

Next week we will continue with some concrete proposals to increase the profitability of those plantations and keep the wolf out. (To be continued.)

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