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Halt Sugar Travails

Dec 23, 2012 Editorial

News that GuySuCo will not reach its revised target of 237,000 tonnes (from 270,000 tonnes) this year has not surprised industry observers. But the constant cavilling over the causes of the shortfall suggests a studied refusal to deal with the structural features underlying the decline of the industry. This will do no one – in the industry or out – any good.
Erratic weather patterns are now the new norm. We are one of the countries that has made climate change the centre of our development strategy. Have we not factored in the certainty of non-predictable low and dry seasons due to the impact of climate change? It used to be that we could depend on an almost fixed number of weeks of dry weather in Berbice and Demerara. Demerara was always wetter.
Our planners will have to take into consideration this uncertainty when we make projections. As recently as late October it had been suggested that the 237,000 tonne target would be made ‘easily’. We were too optimistic – as even the sugar unions suggested.
The Opposition carping on ‘poor management’ as the cause of the industry’s woes is not without merit – but we wish they would advise how we can address the challenge. The sugar industry is not the industry of choice for the bright, young, qualified executive. For one, the pay scales are still very low compared with the competition. The association with “field labour’ provides a further disincentive. A paradigm shift in attitudes will need to be effectuated if the vital ‘field managers’, who would be willing to actually step into the fields, are to be attracted and retained.
The low labour turnout is not going to be reversed in the near or medium term, unless we can import cheap labour from Haiti or somewhere else. As we have pointed out ad nauseam in this space, the government has been a victim of its own success as far as labour in the sugar industry is concerned.
Historically stigmatised, given a choice of being the most unqualified helper on a building site making $3000 daily compared to far less than that when the ‘off grinding’ periods are factored-in in the sugar industry, it should not surprise anyone that we now have an endemic labour shortage in sugar. It will not disappear.
The upsurge in gold mining had pulled many, often qualified, sugar workers into the interior. In Berbice, where the strategic plan has targeted the bulk of sugar production, the planners must figure in what will be the impact on labour of oil, which has to be struck, sooner or later. Talk of increased mechanisation will remain that – talk – because our method of sugar cultivation with our capillary-like network of drains produce waterlogged soils that will be compacted by machinery and lead to reduced cane quality.
The question boils down to whether the industry can generate enough profits to pay at least double the prevailing wages.
With the admission that after out-of-crop maintenance the Skeldon factory is still only at 60-65% of its capacity (and this is arguable) and producing sugar at 19.6 tonnes of cane for 1 tonne of sugar – almost double the old Berbice industry standard – profitability is not on the horizon. Our production costs are certainly much greater than the present US.19 cents per pound on the world market which just about matches the ‘preferential’ price on the EU market.
The EU has signalled it will soon abandon this last vestige of Lome.
We are not implying for a moment that the choices in front of the Minister of Agriculture are easy or even palatable. But with his grounding in the natural sciences, we hope he will be guided by hard, empirical data and not wishes. For instance, does he really believe that the West Demerara cultivation can sustain two factories? Even in the glory years of Bookers, these were the highest cost estates and nothing that has been done since has increased their productivity.
If anything, the opposite has been true. It is time to make some tough decisions.

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