We will fix the mistakes at Skeldon factory - Ramotar

We will fix the mistakes at Skeldon factory – Ramotar

Apr 15, 2013 News

President Donald Ramotar

President Donald Ramotar has assured Private Sector representatives in Berbice that the government is working assiduously to “correct the mistakes at the Skeldon Sugar Factory”.
In March, Cabinet Secretary Dr. Roger Luncheon announced that the US$200M Skeldon Sugar Factory, which was built as part of Government’s plan to reverse the sorrowful state of the country’s sugar industry was a “letdown”.
The Skeldon Sugar Factory is operating at just over 50 per cent of its capacity, and it was announced by the government in December last that millions of dollars being spent to modify the factory will still not bring it to its full operational capacity.
The Skeldon Estate was designed to produce 110,000 tonnes of sugar per annum.
In 2010, production was 33,237 tonnes and in 2011, production was 29,410 tonnes. Former President Bharrat Jagdeo had vowed to see the factory up to its full capacity.
Mr. Ramotar told the Berbice private sector over the weekend that the government had hoped that Skeldon would have performed much better, “but unfortunately it didn’t, but we are moving to correct those mistakes and I have every confidence that it will realize its full potential in the not too distant future.”
Mr. Ramotar is hoping that by the next out- of- crop, all of the remaining work left to be done on the factory will be completed.
Addressing the deficiencies at the modern sugar factory is South African firm, Bosch. However, critical works such as modification to the punt dumper design and replacement of the structure was not catered for in the Bosch contract.
The defects which will be fixed in the Bosch redesign works are those related to the bagasse feeding system and the cane conveyor system. Installing a condensate tank and obtaining a clean water supply to the factory are also on the cards.
President Ramotar believes the other sugar factories across the country can do well with more co- generation plants like the one at Skeldon. Guyana’s energy (electricity) needs will [continue to] rise in the years to come, even with the operation of the Amaila Falls Hydro Power project.
“We would have been using up all the power that the plant [Amaila] produces…. Sugar has a big role to play, [so] we must not see sugar as just sugar anymore, but we have to start seeing sugar as a complex,” the President stated.
Sugar, he said, “has not been performing as well as we wanted to”…but he believes that it has a great future, hence government’s continued investment in the sector.
“The industry has to move to do things differently, and in any type of transition in this nature with such a huge industry, it creates some levels of difficulty.”
The President noted too, that it is only a matter of time that all of the fields in GuySuCO will have to be redone to “make them more machine friendly.”
The industry, he stated, must be made more capital intensive and [must] move away from the labour intensive mode in which it currently operates.