Joe Singh blasts lack of discussion with laid-off sugar workers

Mar 05, 2018 News

The discussions regarding the future of sugar workers and the wider industry needs to move from the confines of boardrooms and media to meetings with the people.
This is the view of former Special Assistant to President David Granger, Major-General (Ret’d), Joe Singh, who recently chaired a forum held at the Moray House last Tuesday, that explored solutions for Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) that saw more than 4,000 sugar workers being laid off from the state-run Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo).
“We have to sit with people. Not too many persons have sat with the cane harvesters or the people who have been displaced. We have confined our discussions to the board room and the media. I feel we have to get out there and do some bottom house meetings. Talk to people and find out what is going on,” Singh encouraged.

Former workers of Wales Estate protest the Ministry of the Presidency over the payment of severance.

Major-General (Ret’d), Joe Singh

The retired Major-General noted that he is not a politician and doesn’t belong to any political party. He said representatives from all political parties have ‘a bee in their bonnet’ when it comes to the issue of sugar.
Singh shared the views of persons who have expressed that politicians once elected, turn their backs, become big ones with the ‘brief cases and fancy cars’.
He noted that the contact between decision makers and the people is negligible, through negligence or an attitude that politicians have arrived.
“It is not going to help whether they are sugar workers, bauxite workers, fishermen, taxi drivers whatever it is.
Government has been encouraging sugar workers to tap into a micro-financing scheme and to take advantage of various training opportunities in masonry, carpentry, information and communication technology and home economics.
However, Singh explained that provision of training must first be developed after discussions with the workers.
“I think we have to listen to them and find out if they want to be plumbers, carpenters and masons. We tend to look down on people,” Singh noted.
Most of the former GuySuCo workers affected are in Regions Six where officials closed the Skeldon and Rose Hall Estates and in Region Three, (Essequibo Islands/West Demerara), the closure of the Wales Estate.
Prior to the closure of the sugar estates in Region Six, the population has been declining— from 152,386 in 1980 to 109,431 in 2012. It is this Region that economic experts anticipate will be the hardest hit.
Singh has stated that there are enough studies available to Guyana where there have been similar effects elsewhere in the closure of coal mines in the early 1990s in the United Kingdom (UK), Russia, Romania and Ukraine and the 2003 closure of the Caroni (1975) Limited sugar estate in Trinidad.
He believes that there are lessons which Guyana should have learnt in the approach to the downsizing and redundancies in the sugar industry.
The government recently announced that it is close to securing a loan of some $10B to $15B to fund the operations of the sugar industry via NICIL. The plan is to re-open the estates because investors want to examine the sugar factories in working condition. There have been 70 expressions of interest to purchase the estates.
The Coalition Government has indicated that they have injected over $32B in subsidies for the past three years, which placed a financial strain on the country’s coffers.

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