The alleged degradation of services provided by this estate is nothing new

Oct 03, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
It is usually of interest that many who pontificate on specific issues to a largely under-informed public, appear to assume that amongst the latter there is not a body of knowledge better informed about the subject than they.
One could not help but react to reported political support for cane farmers on the Upper Corentyne in their reported brouhaha with the Skeldon Estate management. The impression given is that the alleged degradation of services provided by the estate only just now erupted, when in fact it had to be a hangover from previous dispensations.
Not many of the public will know that the relationships between the cane farmer and estate (the Manufacturer) are prescribed in detail in the National Cane Farmers Committee Act Chap 69.04 of 1965. Regulations to the Act constitute of a contract to be executed between the parties – a condition that has been honoured in the breach throughout this century.
Successive subject Ministers, rather than implement the provision for the establishment of District Associations who would elect farmers’ representatives to the National Cane Farming Committee, with official counterparts appointed by Government, latter dealt selectively with (favoured) farmers.
The travesty became so entrenched that the organisational lapse continues, albeit without the sensitive appreciation of the current administration of its existence.
Consequently, GuySuCo has continued to adhere to the well entrenched habit of not concluding contracts with cane farmers, the current generation of whom know little about the governing legislation which obviously has long required amending.
While habits of any kind die hard, the newly appointed directorate has tried to be renovative (if not wholly innovative). At the same time some farmers, who have endured years of peremptory decision-making, have found themselves in a financial and operational quagmire – very much like the estates themselves.
No strategic effort was made over the past years to ensure farmers’ sustained viability, again as has been the experience of GuySuCo itself.
So that from the perspective of those who have been closely involved with the development of small cane farming, including through their formation as cooperatives, since the 1960s, and have monitored and regularly reported to the press on the vicissitudes of their existence, can recognise the current dissemblance being publicly perpetrated.
Surely the earnest of the current GuySuCo administration would have resonated amongst cane farmers and other stakeholders at the conference recently held at the Convention Centre, which allowed for structured discussion on the very problems that impact on the production, productivity and viability, not only of private cultivations, but on the sugar industry as a whole.
The exercise was aimed at providing a mutually agreed basis for greater cooperation in the future. Recrimination can hardly make a positive contribution to achieving such an objective.
On the other hand, it may be too much to expect that with a track record of non-compliance with the relevant legislation, the erstwhile management group can rise from their insularity to congratulate GuySuCo and farmers on the achievement of the first 10,000 tons week production since 2009.
E.B. John

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