They want to sell out Guysuco

Oct 28, 2015 Letters

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Dear Editor,
THE king sits in Dunfermline town
Drinking the blude-red wine;
‘O whare will I get a skeely skipper
To sail this new ship o’ mine?’
O up and spak an eldern knight,
Sat at the king’s right knee;

‘Sir Patrick Spens is the best sailorThat ever sail’d the sea.(This old Scottish ballad tells the story of Sir Patrick Spens who was conscripted by the King to perform an impossible task – to sail during the most tempestuous season of the North Atlantic Ocean to fetch the King’s daughter from Norway.  Sir Patrick lamented his conscription, but obeyed. He successfully made the trip to Norway, but on his return journey, encountered a boisterous storm and the ship sank, with Captain crew and Princess, all lying at the bottom of the sea.)
Which brings me to the eldern knights of the Guysuco COI, all primed with blude-red wine, having woken up from their stupor in their itinerant five-star abodes, and deciding, after many days of expensively funded revelry and deliberations, that this industry was not for old men, and they should sell out. They, themselves, each of them, with the exception of the Chairman of the COI, had already sold out Guysuco some 20, 30, 40 years before when each contributed directly to its demise. And they were prepared to do so, and did it all over again . This time, these unpatriotic sons of our soil  are going to sell Guysuco to the highest bidder – their decision obviously based on the naïve assumption that there exists out there in the capitalist world some entrepreneur who would altruistically adopt a US $200 million liability, an overly labor-intensive industry inclined to be held ransom by a powerful labor union, and most un-enterprising of all, an industry with a production cost of two and half times its revenue. In all likelihood, there is no such entrepreneu. Oh, what skeely sailors they are, these  Chinese! Who else but hegemonistic land grabbers would be interested in a sugar industry that is heavily subsidized? And don’t these eldern knights know that in most countries sugar is subsidized! Not even in America (Domino Sugar Corp) where capitalization is at its zenith – yet the industry is subsidized. (I personally visited Domino in Florida and saw the extent of their capitalization.)
These  knights want to pelt us back to the 1830s when sugar was on the brink of disaster and needed new blude”, having “drunkenlyvampired” everything from Africa. They want to take us back to slavery and indentureship. Back to foreign ownership. Worse, instead of Western masters we would have Mandarin-speaking ones. Never mind selling out Guyana to a permanent state of primary production with little or no hope of secondary and tertiary linkages. No hope of an agriculture-led industrialization for which Guyana is an ideal candidate.  Never mind the theories of structural changes in agricultural production, and backward and forward linkages; never mind the enormous potential for an  agricultural demand-led industrialization –all theories articulated by early economists Jorgensen, Fei and Ranis, and more later ,Kuznets, all of whom believed that a fully articulated development  process of a potentially strong agricultural economy involved the concomitant transformation of agriculture so that it becomes  fully integrated into the industrial economy. These knights are obviously not interested in any medium or long term development plan which uses agriculture – our greatest endowment – as the base.
Politically, forget “land to the tiller”. Forget diversification – that is for young people with strong hearts, minds and bodies. Forget our patrimony, our birthright. Forget that the sweat, tears and “blude”of our parents and fore-parents so richly fertilized the cane roots that we are now able to comfortably recluse in foreign capitals; forget the groaning in the graves of our founding fathers. Who the hell were Jagan and Burnham, anyway? And wasn’t Eric Williams’ masterpiece, “Capitalism and Slavery” all hogwash? Forget history; we have no problem re-living it in another country. Forget that all human and spiritual values, yea, our closeness to God, all germinate and grow from our relationship to the very land which the very Lord, our God verily gave to us.  Be prodigious, sell it all out and eat, drink out the money. We are already Americans and Canadians citizens, no problem becoming  Chinese. But,”We cannot sell out. We cannot give away. We cannot offer the adversary any corridor or any passage.” Commander in Chief, President David Granger made that declaration this yesterday. Editor, I have tried in the past, and again today to present a social, political, economic , moral and religious justification for diversification and linkage industrialization of Guysuco.
Gokarran David Sukhdeo
 Author -The Silver Lining, (Awarded 1998 Guyana Prize for Literature)

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