Agricultural doldrums

Oct 03, 2012 Editorial

If it is October it must be “Agriculture Month” and we can expect a raft of announcements on how we will be increasing our agricultural output.
Minister of Agriculture, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, announcing the theme for the month – “Better Technology, Better Farming – Ensuring Food Security” – declared that this time there will be “more show than tell” especially in promoting technology.
Unfortunately, he began by trumpeting the technology of the new sugar packaging plant at Enmore, which was provided by the EU in an effort for our sugar prices to become more competitive under the new sugar regime in their markets.
As has been reported by this newspaper, while there is no problem with the technology (not exactly cutting edge) of getting sugar into packets, there have been massive problems in getting the sugar from the fields and factory to the packaging plant. We just do not appear capable of replacing the human labour on the East Coast cultivation – even with mechanised loading technology.
But that brings us to the larger challenges confronting the sugar industry, which still occupies the largest chunk of prime agricultural lands on the coastland. It is now fourteen years since the strategy for the sugar industry was unveiled – and its linchpin was ‘better technology’. According to one summary of the plan, the goal was to reduce unit cost from the then current US$0 .20 U.S. to $0.1261 per pound, including depreciation. The strategy was to concentrate investment on increasing production in the lower cost areas of Berbice, thus maximizing the use of the best class of lands, and to develop larger processing facilities that benefit from economies of scale and more modern technology.
The target for the industry was to achieve production levels up to 457,000 tonnes per annum from the then 350,000 tonnes average by the construction of a new factory at Skeldon, expansion of the one in Albion and the closure of the Rose Hall mill. On paper, all of this was quite sound but the problem has been our inability to absorb the new technology.
Thus after making the largest investment in our history, the new Skeldon factory has still not achieved the production levels of the antiquated abandoned factory. It is only a third of its promised 100,000 tonnes per annum and our total production is a painful 230,000 tonnes – just half of what should be at four years ago.
We would advise that the government proceed very cautiously with these ‘new technologies’ and during the ‘show’ demonstrations in the coming months, ensure that the farmers can absorb them.
With the subject of ‘copyright’ in the air, it might not be inappropriate at this time to remind the Minister that in the original sugar expansion strategy it was declared that, “The use of the term “Demerara” as a geographic indication for both sugar and rum are being pursued.” This newspaper has been calling for a report on this ‘pursuit’ for almost a decade, without any success.
“Geographical Indication” (GI), of course, was the mechanism the developed countries introduced to protect their agricultural products, identified with particular areas (eg Chardonnay), from being copied by producers in other countries.
Today, ‘Demerara’ brown sugar is fetching premium prices across the world – excepting that they do not originate in Demerara, Guyana. For some inexplicable reason the government insisted on pursuing remedies through ‘copyright’ violation, when we never had a ‘copyright’ on the name.
One area of agricultural development that the Minister did not mention was the large-scale farming long promised in the intermediate and interior savannahs. We had heard years ago about several companies that were interested in developing hundreds of thousands of acres of savannah land to produce soya, maize and sugar cane for ethanol.
During the last elections campaign, there was a great outcry when it was revealed that a huge acreage was awarded to Ansa MacAl for ethanol production. Shouldn’t the Guyanese people be brought up to date on these potential game changers in the agricultural sector?