STOP LYING TO SUGAR WORKERS!

Jul 23, 2017 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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Sometime in 2005 the BBC shot a documentary in Guyana and gave it the title: Guyana -Trouble in Paradise. The producer of the documentary had been following then President Jagdeo and some members of the Cabinet with video cameras for about six months. The narrator, Rageh Omar, remarked in that documentary that the President “was furious because the European Union was going to renege on an agreement that was made 30 years ago”. He said that Jagdeo was angry that the EU was not “guaranteeing into perpetuity” the price that the Union would pay for Guyana’s sugar. Remember, this was in 2005, a whole decade before the PPP was voted out of office.
In the same documentary, Omar interviewed the very long sitting president of GAWU, Komal Chand, and asked him what the ramifications of the removal of the European Union’s preferential market and prices for Guyana’s sugar would be. Without any emotion whatsoever, Chand said in a matter-of-fact tone, “It could result in the closure of some sugar estates.” He was neither hesitant nor uncertain. He was emphatic, decisive and clear, spelling out like a doomsday prophet exactly what went on to happen to the sugar industry over the next 10 years.
At the time, GuySuCo’s sales to the EU’s preferential market totaled 70% of the corporation’s revenue. The EU was GuySuCo’s lifeline. Without it, both Chand and Jagdeo knew that sugar would become comatose, if they did not implement the measures that had been suggested by the World Bank since 1998. That was when the EU had issued the first warning about the cessation of preferential treatment. The World Bank’s recommendations then were to close most Demerara estates, and diversify sugarcane lands and machinery into other revenue earners as they gradually reduced the preferential treatment Guyana and most ACP countries benefited from.
Jamaica listened, Trinidad and Tobago listened, Antigua listened and none of them are dependent on sugar or any single industry today. Instead, knowing well what the implications in Guyana would be, the PPP stubbornly kept on plugging millions into the failing industry, ignoring all calls to diversify. This Coalition government is now left with a basket to fetch water in. At this late stage, programmes are beginning implemented to keep workers employed, to find ways to gainfully utilize land and equipment.
The interviewer in that aforementioned BBC documentary also spoke with David Dabydeen, later Guyana’s ambassador to China. Dabydeen said to Omar that Guyana “needs an alternative … and it’s not easy to find alternatives nowhere in today’s world”. So, sure it’s not easy to change or challenge tradition, but that is reality everywhere in the world. Change is the one constant in life.
Let’s be reasonable. Sugar production is hard, demanding work. Field workers prepare the land, fertilize it and cut ripened canes, and in out-of-crop season they have to ‘ketch dey hand’ at odd jobs such as clearing land, cleaning trenches, working in someone’s rice field or in a Manager’s garden on the estate. They even catch and sell ‘backdam’ fish to raise a little cash. Too many workers live in poverty, unable to afford some basic material things, repeating a punishing cycle year come and year go. The PPP knew all this when it was in government, and they know it now, but it doesn’t bother them one little bit to watch our people struggle to live, and fight to keep their hard life, the only one they know.
It brings the Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund to mind. This was the fund that, in decades gone, would be used to provide their needs. It even had a Bursary award scheme that paid for sundry items for children who were successful at Common Entrance (now NGSA). Today the Labour Welfare Fund is useless, and the sugar workers’ National Insurance contributions have not been paid to NIS in years!
It’s ironic, but this PPP group that is fighting so hard to keep the support of these thousands of sugar workers, has done nothing to lift these people out of poverty, or even to provide some infrastructure for their communities.
Maybe it was not just shortsightedness, stubbornness and pure selfishness that kept the PPP from doing something about the long term welfare of sugar workers. In ideal circumstances, since the turn of the century, the politicos would have done their utmost to aggressively diversify the industry and change the workers’ future. But that’s asking too much from Jagdeo’s bunch. They did nothing but watch a once prosperous industry become a black hole.
In the 2017 budget, $9B was allocated to prop up GuySuCo. There’s a debt of G$85B to pay. That’s many million dollars’ worth of road repairs, health facilities, teachers, books and tablets for school children in the hinterland, and police officers and vehicles to patrol the mining districts.
Now there is no alternative. A programme of diversification, divestment and contracted amalgamation is unavoidable. Guyana has to retain sugar operations to supply the local and the established international markets, but the industry has to be reoriented. Its workers have to be refocusing on viable ‘other crops’ and value-added products like vinegar, wines, methane and the many by-products of molasses.
Sugar workers should not be duped into believing that they have only one option to provide for their families. These men and women are hardworking people and this Government would like to steer them aside from employment that condemns them to perpetual, cyclical, generational poverty.
We wish that the PPP would stop lying to the sugar workers and join us in ensuring that their standard of living improves; that they get the educational opportunities and exposure to technology they should have.

 

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