Peter paying for Paul

Dec 22, 2008 Editorial

‘Tis the third day of Christmas, but it doesn’t appear that the stockings of sugar workers will be full with their expected Annual Production Incentive (API) bonus this year. Shortfalls in the year’s production from an initially expected 315,000 tons to a likely 225,000 tons at the end of the crop have been touted as the reason for the Scrooge-like behaviour on the part of their employer, GuySuCo.

On the surface, this rationale may sound plausible, but does it stand to scrutiny? This newspaper thinks not.
This country has embarked on a fundamental rationalisation of the industry that has been the raison d’etre for the very formation of this country.

We are in the midst of the single largest investment in the history of the country to expand sugar production by constructing a most modern and efficient factory and a doubling of cultivated lands at Skeldon.

In all the estates there are various strategies for consolidating production and diversifying into complementary products that are intended to bolster profitability. These are all to the good. However, all these plans depend on one input that we cannot afford to alienate – the men and women who toil in the canefields in and out of season.

No matter how we slice it, dice it, or puree it, we cannot escape that fundamental point. We may glibly talk about “mechanisation” as the panacea of the future – but we all know that in real life there are no panaceas.
The harsh reality is that for a number of reasons, not the least being the nature of our rainfall patterns that we are presently experiencing, sugarcane cultivation will remain a labour-intensive undertaking.

If, after our massive investment, the workers conclude that they will continue to be given the short end of the stick as has been their lot since the days of slavery, they will decamp the industry and leave it high and dry.

After all, with the incontrovertible improvement in the economic landscape since 1992, there are now alternatives to the drudgery of the canefields – once the economic incentives are undercut.

And this argument has been demolished by the investigations of the Minister of Agriculture himself into the East Demerara Estates’ precipitous production decline. As a report in our yesterday’s edition pointed out, the decline was primarily due to the deterioration of the infrastructure of the estates and the absence of managers in the fields.

One can hardly lay these shortcomings at the feet of the workers so as to make them accept telling their families that there will be no “extra” in their paychecks this year. And this “extra” was not only to give them a fillip for the Christmas holidays – we have to understand that the new crop will not begin until February and that the “out-of-crop” work has been swept away in the present rains. Some sugar workers have not worked since mid-October.

A good chunk of the shortfall this year is also a consequence of the failure of the Chinese contractors to deliver the new Skeldon Factory as originally scheduled for the end of last year.

This is not the fault of the workers. The decision to cannibalise the old Skeldon factory before the new factory was commissioned and thereby causing the literal loss of cane and husk is also not the fault of workers.

Have the managers who made that disastrous decision been fired? Or has he been drawing his salary uninterruptedly since? The huge swathes of empty canefields at Uitvlugt, which precipitated a shutdown two months before the normal schedule and has caused a halving of their normal production for several crops now, are also not the fault of workers.

The present Booker-Tate management team contracted to run the industry and advise the administration seem to assume that their experience in Swaziland can be transferred here: but our sugarcane field workers are not seasonal workers who return to their “homelands” in the off season to grub a living.

Ours have to survive all year round on their wages from GuySuCo. A generous API goes a long way in ameliorating the hardships of the off-season. Do not punish the workers for the sins of management.

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