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The plight of the sugar industry

Nov 25, 2010 Editorial

Sugar was long regarded as the lifeblood of the country. Today, it seems as if the country is haemorrhaging this lifeblood. It is all but non-existent. If one were to look at the production figures then examine the problems being encountered by the Skeldon sugar factory constructed to spearhead production, then one would certainly come to the conclusion that sugar is all but dead.
Indeed, the country expected problems when the European Union slashed the price it was paying to Guyana for its sugar by an amount that saw the country losing some US$36 million a year. As if this was not enough the sugar workers began pressing for more money, ostensibly to cushion the effects of inflation.
It is not by accident that sugar has often been described as bitter sweet. The bitterness often came from the truculence of the workers who invariably felt that they were being asked to shed their blood for little or no reward. This went back to the days of slavery. Then in 1948 the workers again protested violently over a system that operated in the sugar industry. Five of them died.
There has hardly been any peace in the sugar industry. During the turbulent 1960s and continuing throughout the tenure of the People’s National Congress the sugar industry was always a hotbed of crisis. It even became a political weapon because workers, on behalf of the main opposition party at that time, burnt acres upon acres of cane.
They struck, and the government resorted to using civilians, some of them public servants to cut the cane. The damage took years to correct. The very workers forced the then government of changing the union with which it had signed a collective labour agreement. The Manpower Citizens Association (MPCA) was the representative union and the workers rejected it with such vehemence that the industry suffered.
In came the Guyana Agricultural Workers Union (now the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union) and for a while all was well. Now the very GAWU is being accused of participating in the destruction of the industry at a time when the very government that the union supports is in charge.
Experts say that all this could have been avoided if Guyana had simply got out of sugar but the government looked at the economic and social costs. It is indeed true that it would be cheaper for Guyana to import sugar than to use what it produces. But there was the social cost, as we said.
First off, some 80,000 people –the sugar worker, his wife and children, would have been directly affected. They would have been asked to join the breadline. The shops that depend on the sugar workers would have been forced to close; the national coffers would have lost the taxes accruing from work in the sugar industry; and myriad social ills.
Then there would have been the criminal activities that result from unemployment. Sometimes the social scientists feel that it is cheaper to have GuySuCo operating at a loss than to fund the maintenance of the criminals in custody. The society would also have to move to protect the likely victims—everyone—by increasing the security services.
The sugar workers, today, are being true to form. They have no interest in the financial state of the very company that provides them with employment. They want their pound of flesh and one can only assume that this is how it should be. The workers are the ones who have to work to keep the industry alive although they depend on the very industry for their survival. It is a chicken and egg situation.
The workers and the union all believe that the government has contributed to the poor state of the sugar industry by spending so much on the Skeldon factory and presiding over the poor performance of that facility.
The government is contending that the workers are paid more than 60 per cent of what the industry earns and that this is preventing the industry from conducting much needed repairs.
What the nation is seeing is the slow collapse of the industry. This is allowed to happen because the bulk of the workers form the electoral base of the ruling party.

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