Sugar on the ropes

Jun 09, 2013 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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After I left active politics in 2006, I decided to stop writing polemically in general and on sugar in particular. I took to heart my own frequently cited caution of Foucault as to whether anyone “had ever seen a new idea from a polemic”. And I always knew we needed new ideas in sugar. From the moment of my return to Guyana I took the problematic of sugar very seriously. How could I have done otherwise?
Even though I had done the “American dream” thing –  with the house in the suburb and the two cars in the garage since 1979 – it never crossed my mind not to return to the sugar plantation from where I’d come. It was what had shaped my thinking and instilled values that stood the test of time – even in corporate America. In 1989, I was jailed and beaten by the police for the first (and only) time in my life after I’d participated in a sugar-worker march against the “ten-to-one” devaluation by Hoyte back in 1989.
With the grandparents who raised me having toiled for more than a century between them in the sugar industry – but collecting grand pensions of $6 in total – my sense of social justice did not need much honing. And I knew the industry literally from the inside – while my corporate experience in the textile industry in the States, offered me a view from the outside. The people among whom I grew up, who mostly worked in the sugar industry, were like every other group anywhere – with the same distribution of intelligence etc. But because of the lack of opportunities some of the smartest people I knew laboured in the fields and factories.
The point I want to make is that these “ordinary” workers knew more about sugar than most of the managers who lorded it over them. Even as a “force ripe” stripling on the periphery of the street corner “gaff”, you learnt more about the industry than if you had attended a graduate course on sugar management. So when I began commenting on the problems of sugar after 1989 (“The ‘estate’ is still a plantation” etc…) I was bringing to bear this insider knowledge, along with the challenges traditional industries (textile manufacturing in the US; sugar here) were facing in an emerging new global order.
I’ve always found it ironic that my interventions were seen as either “academic” or “political” but never as from an “insider”. If one goes back to my early proposals, they were all based on the premise that sugar would eventually have to be phased out in our country. For one, as the son and grandson of sugar workers, I knew that every member of that fraternity considered it their personal failure if a child of theirs ended up in the cane fields. Especially in Demerara, I knew that there would be labour problems when the economy improved and there was alternative employment.
When this factor was combined with the longer wet season in Demerara and its poorer soils, it did not take a rocket scientist to suggest that these lands be diversified out of sugar. I proposed they be transferred in 15-acre plots to sugar workers for their sweat equity. They could then supply the factories that would process the higher value crops, such as rice etc. that would be substituted. The phenomenally installed drainage and irrigated systems would not have been wasted. We still believe that this is the way to go in Demerara.
At the time, I opposed the construction of a new factory at Skeldon: not because I felt it would not perform (who could know this?) but because I believed that for one quarter of the expenditure, we could expand Albion and Rose Hall (as had also been proposed), and consolidate the operations of the others until the Demerara plantations were phased out. I felt we would have been able to maintain production at 350,000 tonnes until we were in a position to make a decision in Berbice.
Working with a US company that had traditional textile mills (from spinning to weaving), I saw early on what pressures from low-cost foreign producers could do to higher cost producers, even as the latter furiously modernised. Even after we had moved plants from the North to “labour-friendly” North and South Carolinas, blue-collar workers gravitated to the new Japanese auto factories that wanted the same workers. There was only so much that textile lobbyists could do. I never expected the EU to honour the Lome Protocol “in perpetuity”.
So we are now in a bigger fix than before. This is no time for finger pointing. Those that are in charge of the industry will have to have the fortitude to take a hard look around and make some hard decisions. Take it from one who still lives in the shadow of a sugar factory chimney – “black dust” and all.

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