The end of the year, the end of a historic industry

Dec 30, 2017 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Thousands of sugar workers will be without jobs come Monday. For them, the New Year will bring bleakness. They will be joining the workers of Wales who one year ago were put on the breadline.

The government could have saved the jobs of those sugar workers if it wanted to. The government, however, keeps insisting that the subventions that it has to provide to the sugar corporation were bleeding the economy.

The government’s memory is short. It seems to have forgotten all those years when it milked the sugar industry of its profits in order to feed the rest of the nation. It forgot that in 1992, it was extracting more than four billion dollars from the sugar industry, an amount that is today worth more than ten billion dollars.

The sugar levy was introduced initially in 1974 as a mean of bankrupting Bookers so as to force the company to import foreign exchange to meet its cash flow. It continued after nationalisation as a means of denying sugar workers their just entitlements. The levy was extracted before profits; it reduced the amounts which were payable to workers. It was ‘pickpocket’ levy intended to rob sugar workers.

Sugar fed public servants. Sugar provided a buffer for other industries when they needed it. But today because of the cuts in export prices, sugar is facing a crisis and is being allowed to sink. The sugar industry which once fed this nation is being told that the public coffers cannot support its request for temporary assistance until 2020.

In 2018, the government will pump six billion dollars into the coffers of Guysuco. Another US$30M would have saved the jobs of those four thousand sugar workers. It would have allowed the sugar company to keep the three estates, which are to be closed, going. Instead, those estates are now to be closed. There is nothing in place for those workers. They are being thrown out to the lions. They are being put on the breadline without any thought as to how their children will get food.

And yet, the government proudly announces that come 2020, Guyana will be earning some US$ 300M per year from oil. All it will take is for 10% of this amount for the next three years to save four thousand jobs in the sugar industry. The money is there. The money can be found. But the government is not interested in saving sugar. It is interested in punishing the industry because of its traditional support for the PPPC.

In the meantime, the government will in 2018, provide US$10M in subvention to support low electricity tariffs for Linmine. But it cannot find the monies to save the jobs of sugar workers, the same sugar workers who, for decades were being robbed of profit sharing because of the sugar levy.

Come Monday, the future looks bleak for sugar workers. They will have a long struggle ahead to survive. They have known hard times before but not even Booker’s would have cast them loose in this manner.

For these workers, it is not just the loss of income. It also marks the end of an industry and end of an era, which in most cases was the only one they and their parents and grandparents knew. Without sugar, the economy of Rose Hall, Enmore and Skeldon will perish.

Sugar should not have been allowed this swift death. Sugar made this country and it rescued this country. Were it not for sugar, none of us would have been here today. None of us! Even though sugar production is set to continue, it really makes no practical sense to be producing 150,000 tonnes of sugar. The cut in production will signal the end of sugar eventually. The industry will not survive 2050.

Yet the government was in a celebratory mood to announce that earnings from oil would amount to US$300 M per annum. The government expects in the next three years to be awashed in money. Yet, it has mercilessly pulled the plug on these workers when 10% of its first year oil earnings could have kept Rose Hall, Skeldon and Enmore open for one more year.

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The end of the year, the end of a historic industry

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