PPP and GAWU’s scare tactics must be challenged

Apr 30, 2017 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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The news that a ‘White Paper’ on the future of the sugar industry in Guyana is to be presented in the National Assembly is welcome. GuySuCo is the country’s largest employer. However over the past two decades the company has struggled and incurred losses of more than $40 billion dollars. It is clear that the current business model of the company is unsustainable.
In the case of GuySuCo, it is no secret that the Peoples Progressive Party- PPP historically garnered support from a large segment of sugar workers. Throughout its years in government, the PPP, using its surrogate, the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union (GAWU), kept this segment of the population under its thumb and exercised little or no economic foresight to enact the necessary diversification and innovations to keep the industry viable.
In 1990, the sugar industry wages were $980 million, but after the contracting of Booker Tate to run the company, they raised the sugar workers’ salaries to $2.7 billion in 1991, a nearly three hundred percent increase. In 1992, the sugar workers’ salaries were doubled again to $4.8 billion dollars; the PPP after getting into power continued to award more increases which raised the industry wage bill to 12 billion dollars by the year 2000.
In 2002, GuySuCo’s Chairman warned that employment costs were so high that the viability of the industry was threatened, but that warning fell on deaf ears and the escalation continued. The industry wage bill in 2006 climbed to $16.6 billion, and since 2001, the sugar industry wage bill has amounted to over 63% of total cost.
The Guyanese taxpayers have spent over $500 billion to bailout GuySuCo over a period of ten years. Yet the PPP and GAWU defend this practice solely on the basis that GuySuCo is far too important to fail, instead of proposing methods to restructure GuySuCo to make it viable, or give reasons why too big to fail is a threat to an already fragile economy.
As a people we must forge a new relationship with sugar. The company as presently constituted cannot be sustained. In the 1980’s the government of the day saw the wisdom of diversification and GuySuCo’s ‘other crops division’ was established, as the vehicle to diversify the sugar industry.
Here is a quote from the Chairman’s (GuySuCo) Statement for 1987.

“With regards to diversification, the Corporation continues to press ahead with great enthusiasm. 1987 saw the acquisition of a further 500 pure bred Holstein cows from the USA and, at the time of writing, the rotary milking parlour at the new Versailles Complex is about to be commissioned. Slurry facilities are nearing completion and the Corporation will shortly be entering into an agreement to purchase a dairy.
We concluded negotiations for the purchase of a five ton rice mill which is expected to be commissioned by January 1989.
It would be fair to report also, that progress has been made in the development of management systems for the successful cultivation of corn, sorghum and soya beans”.

It is apposite to note that in 1987 GuySuCo Crop Diversification Division encompassed six active programmes; rice, livestock, aquaculture, grain crops, vegetables, root crops and orchards crops. That was in 1987, almost three decades ago. The then government had prepared the foundation and started to build a diversified sugar industry in Guyana.

GOING FORWARD
Estates can be converted to produce value added products like canned fruits and vegetables which can be grown on abandoned sugar cane fields; workers can be leased lands to engage in farming or livestock rearing; a smaller mechanized industry can become productive by producing sugar, bagasse, ethanol and reusable energy that can be used to power the factories and the excess sold to utility companies.
Workers can form agricultural co-ops with micro financing and low interest small business loans; water management can be managed by local governments or a new army corps of engineers. Changing some of our factories to ethanol plants can in time give our economy a boost, provide good paying jobs, and end our dependency on expensive imported energy.
The scare tactics being used by the PPP and GAWU to agitate the sugar workers about amalgamation and diversification need to be challenged. We can do better and the workers must be educated that amalgamation and diversification is not a death sentence or guaranteed unemployment.
The sugar industry in Guyana as currently configured cannot survive, and that is the truth. Guyana is not competitive as a sugar producer, our costs are too high.
One definition of madness is; “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Let us face it, a sugar industry in Guyana devoid of diversification is an industry destined to a slow and painful death. Unless we take bold initiatives now and transform the industry in the near term, then like a malignant cancer, it will continue to weaken the economy and eventually drag it to the point of no return.

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