Fish is more profitable than sugar

Dec 19, 2013 Letters

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Dear Editor,
A friend of mine on seeing my letter to the media concerning alternative agricultural operations and especially aquiculture asked me how growing a few fish can be a bigger industry than the massive sugar cane industry with all of the capital and other infrastructure Sugar represents as an industry. How can aquaculture give us more income than sugar?
There are two main reasons why it is so; Climatic condition is one. The PPP which cannot grow sugar cane under these wet conditions always blames the weather. But an analysis of the weather pattern over the past 100 years tells us that even though we have had wet periods and dry periods, the rainfall is not more today than it was several decades, even centuries ago.
For example I wrote a commentary in January 2004 predicting much of what you are seeing now. In it I said, “Ladies and gentlemen the PPP have been very lucky in the 11-odd years they have been in power. In none of those 11 years have they had to deal with the traditional high rainfall this country experiences, especially along the east and west coast from Abary to Uitvlugt.
“And they have been complacent in the way they have maintained the existing infrastructure on the coast, since coming to power, especially in regions 4 & 5.”
I then gave this example of the period 1966 to 1976 and I do not need to remind anyone that we had the sugar industry then. “ Let me give you the rainfall that occurred in this country between 1966 and 1976 to establish the high levels this country can traditionally expect.
I will give you the rainfall as recorded at Houston estate during those years, in 1966 the rainfall was 118.4 inches; in 1967 it was 165.69; inches in 1968 it was 131.20; in 1969 it was 110.71 inches; in 1970 it was 157.89 inches; in ‘71 it was 140.79 inches; in ‘72 it was 112.05 inches; in 1973 it was 125.95 inches; in 74 it was 116.93 inches; in 75 it was 129.87 inches; and in 76 it was 146.93 inches. We did not know about El Nino but we knew that there were years of extremely high rainfall alternating with several years of low rainfall.”
In no year since 2005 have we received anywhere near these rainfall numbers.  Also Guyana experiences more rainfall than 96% of the rest of the land area of the planet, making it one of the wettest places in the world with an average precipitation of over 80 inches a year.
The PPP, illiterate as they are in this matter, have only just discovered this fact and blames the rain for all of their incompetence, but this high rainfall has been going on for most of our history and I am talking about since the dawn of time history.
To make a bad situation worse we cannot drain this high rainfall until the tide is low on the coast and most of the time the land is soggy. Anywhere in the sugar belt in Demerara if you dug a hole in the ground 18 inches deep you will hit ground water; in Berbice it may be a little deeper perhaps a little over 24 inches.
There is then the other contention. It is not feasible to convert our cane cultivation which has a cambered bed layout with deep drains located every 36 ft. into something which can accommodate mechanical harvesting. All efforts to do this are failing Sangster in GuySuCo is telling us about a system which he feels confident will work. But even if we use his high 40 tons per hour reaping and not our 25 tons an hour reaping numbers which is our information, using a machine which is capable of cutting 100/150 tonnes an hour under the right field conditions in Australia for example, I wonder if he has even thought of the cost repercussions of doing this?
During late 2005 the government called for a fast track development plan to develop aquaculture in Guyana since our conditions were considered perfect for this sort of application. We obtained a loan of US1 million from the IDB, and the Ministry of Agriculture. An association of private individuals which was called the National Aquaculture Association of Guyana [NAAG] was formed in 2006. But the trial which followed was seen as a small and middle sized farmer operation by the government and not a full blown industrial operation of aquaculture displacing sugar cane farming.
My own research informs me that worldwide small scale aquaculture has not proved to be very successful compared to large scale operations.
The trials done for the Government and the people of Guyana for $200 million was supported with input from the University of Arizona, the Collaborative Research Support Programme, CRSP, an international multi discipline partnership to advance science, education and outreach in aquatic resources.
Following a strategy to dramatically increase efficiency in production in 2006, a technology labelled super male or YY male from the University of Wales in Swansea,UK was introduced into Guyana.
These super males guarantee an all-male progeny. This allows farmers to benefit from the quick rate of growth of an all-male crop of fish. This loan also installed a 200,000 fingerling fish hatchery located at the ministry of agriculture at Mon Repos to supply an all-male fingerling stock to farmers.
They even built a refrigeration installation at Timehri to hold the fish due for export by air.
Guyana’s list of assets in this exercise is listed as very beneficial in view of access to markets, inexpensive labour, the fertility and development of land an abundance of fresh and brackish water and in particular the layout of land in combination with these other advantages shows that Guyana was perfectly suited to semi-intensive Aquaculture.
The conclusion of the trials done here in 2007-2008 discovered that one acre of Red Tilapia yielded in one year 21,780 pounds of tilapia at a stocking density of one fish every four feet.
The price for Tilapia in 2006 was used as US1.10 US dollars a pound (whole fish of around 1 pound each). Today we have to use more like US$2 per pound since the price has gone up, but the trial yielded 21,780 pounds of tilapia per acre x US$2US/pound =US$ 43,560 per acre gross income.
[This is actually two crops a year of 10,890 pounds in each crop] and 10,000 pounds per acre, is well within the best practice yield of 20,000 per acre.
In 2012 the sugar industry produced 218,000 tonnes and gave us a return of US$132 million, that works out to around US$600 US dollars per ton. Each acre of cane field produces about 2 tonnes of sugar today, therefore each acre of sugar cane returns 1200 US dollars a year. GuySuCo currently has 48,000 hectares which is around 120,000 acres.
Now we will put our little problem into perspective mathematically, if we were growing Tilapia instead of cane our income would be US$43,560 a year per acre or nearly 400 percent greater than sugar cane.
If the 120,000 acres of our sugar cultivation was growing tilapia and not sugar cane we would be earning US$5.2 billion from it annually and not the US$132 million annually.
Nothing we have ever done in this country in our history comes even close to the magnitude of this kind of income, even if the study conducted in 2008 had an error of 100 percent we would still be earning US$2.6 billion which is more than gold, rice, bauxite and sugar combined!
What we have done is establish that we have an alternative to sugar which is far superior economically, and as usual we have done nothing just as we have done nothing with our association with Brazil to build us a hydropower dam, a deep water harbour and a road between our two countries because Jagdeo according to sources is saying that they will gobble us up. He prefers the Chinese to do it.
Tony Vieira

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