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Sweet news

Apr 16, 2009 Editorial

Amid all the recent gloom and doom in the financial sector, the news that the new sugar factory at Skeldon is finally operational is sweet music to the ears of all Guyanese.
If sugar is crucial to the economic health of Guyana – and it still dominates our economy after almost four hundred years – the Skeldon operation is even more crucial to the success of the industry.

Scheduled to eventually produce a full quarter of the eventual 450,000-tonne total output, it represents the major hope of ever reducing our overall costs to a level where we can survive in a post-European Union (EU) preferential price era.The news was delivered at the presentation of the Blueprint for the “turn around” of the industry by the Interim Board that had been constituted specifically for this task.
Even though a bit late – it had originally been promised “one month” after January 15th – from its mandate, it should give the new management structure of the industry a detailed game plan in the crucial next three years.

This is vital.Since sugar is such a self-contained world, most Guyanese outside of its ambit are probably unaware of the toll that migration and a poor work-image have taken on the management structure of GuySuCo. The haemorrhaging has forced the board to consider accelerating the period of training for junior managers from two years to possibly six months.
The loss of institutional memory precipitated by this reality cannot be fully substituted by targets and goals, but they should help.

While the full details of the plan were not fully revealed, the declaration by the Minister of Agriculture that it will be discussed with all “stakeholders” is welcome. In addition to the “unions and management” that were specifically mentioned, we hope that the Minister will also be willing to share it with other elected officials.
The most appropriate forum is the Economic Services Committee of the National Assembly. This body provides a collegial atmosphere where questions can be asked and suggestions proffered in a positive manner, unlike the full sessions of the National Assembly that are invariably used to score cheap political points.

We hope that the Chair of this Committee will extend an invitation to the Minister and the GuySuCo Interim Board to review the Sugar Blueprint.
In his comments, the Chairman of the Interim Board alluded to a few aspects of the Blueprint. As has been telegraphed since last year, most of the initiatives evidently will focus on cost cutting.
This, in and of itself, cannot be faulted, but we hope that the plan recognises that it is not just a matter of how much is spent, but also where it is spent. We were heartened by the Minister’s comment that the old canard and red herring about workers’ compensation should not be dragged out. The industry will only survive if a viable partnership is struck with the workers.

But a vibrant industry is produced not only by management policies: the structural conditions within which the industry operates are also significant. Sometime in the past, the Board made a decision to contract-out many of the operations of the industry.
It should be recognised that this move has not produced the expected savings or improved efficiency, but rather has unleashed a debilitating culture of corruption that demotivates the entire workforce – not to mention the bottom line.

Another one was foisted on the company by the World Bank in its misguided neo-liberal dogma that insisted on a private-farmer contribution of at least thirty percent to the new cane acreage to be opened up to supply the new Skeldon factory. While this demand might have looked good on paper, it ignored the historical record of our entrepreneurial class in Guyana. Even with the old price structure (premised on the preferential EU price) in which the percentage to the private cane farmers was higher than in any other sugar producing country, those farmers complained about being short-changed.
We believe that the farmers in Skeldon will never step up to the plate and the Minister might have to kick in the “Plan B” he has alluded to in the past, much sooner that he expected.

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