Mechanization plan bury GuySuCo – Tony Viera

Jul 19, 2014 News

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…presentation to Parliament was clearly distorted

The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) is in dire straits and its management in its move to expand mechanization of the industry, will end up burying it. This is because a turnaround of the industry is impossible, since in effect it is already dead.

This is the view of former Parliamentarian and local specialist on the sugar industry, Anthony Vieira, who recently made his views known by way a public missive published in at least two of the local daily newspapers and in an interview with Kaieteur News.
According to Vieira, “GuySuCo is conducting the very expensive conversion from traditional fields to a mechanical harvester-friendly field layout at the same time; a layout which many knowledgeable people in the industry, including me, believe is fraught with much danger, especially since the estimated cost of doing it is US$1,500 per hectare…. Since the industry is already dead, such a move would be putting the nails in its coffin…or burying it”
Vieira stressed that what is not being told is what effect this has had, and will continue to have on the yield of the cane per hectare which is very low at this time.
He said too that information from other sources in Guyana, indicate that the mechanisation process is causing horrendous damage to the fields, destruction of the cane rows in the areas where the harvesters turn around on each run and heavy compaction to the soil, which destroys its tilth and productivity.
“None of this has been acknowledged, much less quantified by this GuySuCo delegation to the ESC (Economic Services Committee).”
He noted too that GuySuCo is planning to convert 8000 hectares at US$1,500 per hectare by 2017 and “this means that they will have to dip into the consolidated fund for $2.4B to do that alone.
This he said is in addition to the $6B, GuySuCo has estimated that it will need to buy harvesters, trailers and loaders to mechanise; “and when we factor in the already high accumulated losses, the inefficient cost of production, which is currently nearly 100 per cent higher than the world market price for sugar, a very disturbing picture riddled with red ink emerges.”
According to Vieira, “I consider that GuySuCo did not present to the ESC a proper picture of the huge hurdles mechanisation presents to the Industry…They did not indicate what their accumulated losses were at this time and the total amount that the corporation owes, since they have clearly run out of money and credit to pay their staff, which they failed to do last week.”
Vieira in his missive also questioned the accuracy of most of GuySuco’s presentation to the ESC saying that it is cause for concern.
“For example, Singh told the ESC that under Guyana’s soft, muddy, heavy rainfall, and badly drained fields, GuySuCo’s machines harvest 35-40 tonnes per hour. This totally conflicts with a substantial body of work done in other countries which tells me that under the best field conditions 20 tonnes an hour is a more realistic estimate.”
Vieira pointed out too that GuySuCo claims that after they mechanise, their cost of production will come down to 25 per cent of what it was using in hand labour.
“This conflicts also with information from other countries. Brazil, for example, where they are now being forced to stop burning cane by 2020 due to pollution and are phasing out all manual labour by then, is claiming that the reduction in cost from manual to machine is only 50 per cent.”
He noted too that harvesting by machines requires the breeding of newer varieties of cane which are selected through decades of field trials for being very erect in habit to present the cane more efficiently to the harvester.
“We have bred no such varieties, in fact our canes, especially when the yield is high, grows exactly the opposite to erect.”
He notes too that mechanical harvesting leaves a higher stump in the fields, especially those like Guyana’s which are not precision-levelled by laser and this causes sugar losses by leaving the sweetest part of the cane close to the base in the ground and also hampers re-growth.
In his recap of the ESC meeting Vieira observed too that no mention was made of the fact that mechanical harvesting results in a lot of mud getting into the factory with the cane, and at the Skeldon factory which uses diffusers to extract the sugar instead of mills, this has resulted in stoppages of the factory every shift to clean it.
He is of the opinion that in view of the discrepancies in the presentation by GuySuCo to Parliament, there should be a full investigation by some sort of commission into the workings of this industry, since it is clear to him, that the picture presented to the highest forum in the land, was seriously distorted and was, as is now usual for GuySuCo, long on optimism and short on realism.

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