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Knock, but please don’t knock-out the sugar industry

Mar 15, 2014 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
For quite some time now, the media has been replete with knocks to the sugar industry. Most of these appear well-founded, logical and sensible, but certainly not so the recent call for the knock-out blow to an industry that still employs 16,000 persons and sustains the livelihood of thousands of others, including private cane farmers, among whom I include myself as benefitting from the sale of sugarcane to GuySuCo.
The proposed alternative of converting the cane fields to fish farms does not seem to sufficiently take into consideration the real prospects of fixing the current ills of the industry which has proven its resiliency over and over in the past. It certainly ignores the social dislocations and the attendant hardships that will ensue.
Let us try to work together to revive the fortunes of this pre-eminent and previously bountiful industry, even if it means re-privatization or semi-privatization à la the ‘Booker-Tate’ model.
For the proponents of conversion to aqua-culture, I wish to recommend that they seriously ponder the excellent letter in Thursday’s newspapers, unfortunately by an anonymous writer, who made the brilliant suggestion that fish farms be developed on the thousands of acres of available land currently lying idle in our coastal belt.
A casual drive from Georgetown to the Corentyne River will not only demonstrate the availability of more lands than currently sustain the sugar industry, but lands perhaps more suitable for fish farms; at least the exhilaration of the Mahaica-Mahaicony-Abary-Corentyne coast will be worth the drive—a real joy which I look forward to as I do my weekly trip from the ‘ugly city’ to the invigorating Corentyne!
Nowrang Persaud

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