Latest update June 13th, 2026 12:40 AM
Flogging a dead horse
It would seem that in recent times, projects undertaken by the Guyana Government seem to be mired in difficulties. For one, deadlines are not being met. For example, when the government announced that it was going to fight the cuts imposed by the European Union by building a state-of-the-art sugar factory, it set a deadline by which the cost of production would have been a reality.
The government had recognized that it needed to produce sugar at a cost of about US$0:12 cents per pound. This would have made Guyana sugar competitive. Of course, only Guyana, in the region opted to fight the sugar cuts. The other regional producers simply got out of sugar and used the lands for other developmental projects, not least among them housing and agriculture.
Of course, the sugar industry has a political history. It is rooted in the ruling party, it is one of the largest employers in Guyana and above all, it provides a livelihood for about 50,000 people directly and indirectly.
Sugar has long been a political issue to the extent that it split the country down the middle when the late Desmond Hoyte, as head of state, proposed closing a number of sugar estates that had become non-profitable. And some were closed. When the new Government came into office it said that it would not close the sugar estates. Some things are easier said than done.
The changing world sometimes dictates changes. The industrial revolution came and with it the reduced reliance on human labour. Indeed, there were the protests; people damaged machines which they said had come to take their jobs. In the end there was diversification of the human resource. There was also greater use of land that would normally have been left idle. Mankind benefited and the machine helped them immensely.
So it is with the local sugar industry. Guyana was soon caught up in the bind of finding human labour to feed the sugar mills. Over the past decade the labour force has been declining and with good reason. It is the same with the farm lands. People are moving away from the land.
Way back in the 1970s when sugar was king every country moved to maximize production. Cuba, the largest sugar producer in the region raced to mechanise its sugar industry. It sought to drag Guyana along. The Cuban authorities invited the Guyanese to examine the process of mechanization. Cuba also made available to Guyana, some of the equipment that would have aided in cane harvesting.
It turned out that Guyana should have revamped the manner of cane cultivation. But even more, there should have been some soil studies. When Guyana accepted the first bit of machine for mechanization it found that the soil conditions were not favourable for the machines that were imported to reap the cane.
Today, there is much more but the government is not willing to recognize that there is a limit to the volume of money a government can spend to prop up an industry merely for political purposes. As it stands, the very sugar workers, cognizant of their importance to the government, keep making demands that are increasingly harder to meet. Such is now the state of affairs that although the nation is recording declining sugar production and declining earnings, the sugar workers want more money.
One would expect that the government would see the time when it would have to say enough is enough. However, politics can blind the leader and our leaders see the political interest as outweighing all other conditions.
The country is at present repaying the largest ever loan it made in the sugar industry but the returns are not what they should be. The government says that the new mill is producing sugar; that the volume is of no consequence at this time. This is how blinded the political leaders are. For them it matters not that Guyana is hemorrhaging money in place of sugar.
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