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Govt. guilty of strangling sugar industry – AFC

Mar 14, 2014 News

The Alliance for Change (AFC) yesterday vehemently denied that the party ever proposed that the country’s sugar industry should close down and accused the government of strangling the industry.
Moses Nagamootoo said yesterday that government continues to peddle misinformation about the sugar industry when in fact the AFC wants and is calling for a transformation to ensure the survival and sustainability of the industry.
Nagamootoo said that there should be the complete sacking and replacement of the Board of Directors with competent persons. He stressed that “there is the need for a commission of inquiry into the Skeldon Factory, where $44 billion of taxpayers’ money went into modernizing this ‘white elephant’”.
According to Nagamootoo, government continues to be hard-headed and cannot understand the difference between transformation and closure.  He said that after some 21 years in power, it is the PPP government that has brought the sugar industry to its knees through mismanagement, cronyism and downright disregard for the livelihoods of sugar workers.
Nagamootoo said that while government accuses the AFC of supporting the closure of the sugar industry, it is in fact the government that is slowly tightening the noose around the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo)’s neck by “continuing to place square pegs in round holes” to manage the industry.
“The government is also guilty of siphoning off billions of dollars from the EU that could have been spent to turn the industry around, but instead used much of the EU funds intended for sugar to prop-up the economy, while it allowed sugar to slide into further failures,” Nagamootoo asserted.
He said that the position of the Alliance For Change is that GuySuCo must be transformed to make it economically viable and this can be done by ensuring better management of the corporation, retooling the industry to ensure better production and moving towards meaningful diversification and integration of other by-products such as ethanol production.
“At the end of the day, it is the livelihoods of thousands of ordinary workers that are being threatened as the government continues to fool around with the sugar industry” Nagamootoo said.

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