Phase out the cane, phase in a more economical crop like tilapia farming

Dec 13, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
In 2012 with a production of 218,000 tonnes, the sugar industry earned US$132,000,000 according to GuySuCo’s own 2013-2017 strategic plan, but if we were growing Tilapia on the 120,000 acres of GuySuCo we would have made US$23,958/acre x 120,000 acres = $2,874,960,000. US 2.8 billion! Gold which earned $700,000 million in 2012 gave us 51.4 % of our foreign exchange earnings. This tilapia farming can be four times bigger. It’s not going to happen overnight, but instead of taking that already established sugar cane fields and selling it to the PPP boys to level them out to make house lots thereby undoing the work of hundreds of years of slave and indentured labor, we could have had fields with this perfect layout to form aquiculture ponds for our national wealth.
I am not a madman advocating that we return to manual labour, I am saying in my letter that we continue as is with the manual labor and machines we do have, on the area which is currently already converted and not waste more money on further conversions which will never be competitive worldwide and phase out the cane , and phase in a more economical crop i.e. tilapia.
The above attachment tells us that our conditions are perfect for aquaculture. Our field layout of natural 10 acre ponds that we currently have and the rainfall are perfect for this sort of activity even fresh water prawns which is even more lucrative can thrive here, we are wasting money growing sugar cane which can never prosper under these conditions. With the introduction of mechanical harvesting, it will never be efficient here to compete with the world market price, but we have an alternative which is much more lucrative than the sugar and can make us a world class producer.
Last year the US imported 1.5 million tonnes of the tilapia at two dollars a pound, this study uses a low $1.10 US a pound. So today we can earn two times more than 2.8 billion US a year!! that’s 5.6 billion US a year!!
Also last year 90 percent of the prawns sold worldwide came from aquaculture and not the ocean! Also we have in this country fish processors Noble house, Pritipaul Singh, Bruce Vieira etc. If we did our own processing we can get 3-4 dollars a pound in the attachment I am adjusting from 2008 to 2013. That’s US$2.8 billion x 3 = 8.4 billion, that’s 10 times our national budget! John You need to check if my arithmetic is accurate, since this seems too good to be true even to me who have been advocating it for nearly a decade now.
The conversion of the sugar cane fields to our production is potentially a bigger disaster to the industry than Skeldon. And let me tell you this: 120,000 acres of fish farming can offer employment to more than 30,000 people women included since the work is not as strenuous as cane cutting since a cutter who has to cut and load 2.4 tonnes of cane a day on his head. and because of the more lucrative nature of the income we can offer a far better salary and this is 365 days a year work, not like sugar which only really offers 36 weeks a year and an out of crop work of 3 days a week! this is a win win & win win situation Adam.
Finally, we can’ t do this on our own in the time available, since we have done no ground work on it, so we are going to need a strategic partner and the biggest producer in this hemisphere is Ecuador, so I suggest that we pay them a visit and offer them a joint venture partnership.
Tony Vieira

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Phase out the cane, phase in a more economical crop like tilapia farming

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