Political threat stall sugar reform – Finance Minister

Aug 15, 2019 News

The privatization of the sugar estates Government has closed has been delayed.

Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan

Leader of the Opposition, Bharrat Jagdeo

Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan, is blaming this state of affairs on the People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP) promise to review any privatization if it wins the next General Election.
Speaking to the press during a presentation of the 2019 Mid-Year Economic Report, Minister Jordan said, “Nobody is expressing interest when the Opposition says ‘we are going to review sales and so on’ and that happened in the past, too, where people pulled out.”
He said that people will not invest in an atmosphere of uncertainty.
“And I don’t think at this stage, quite frankly, given our status of interim government that we will want to engage in any major privatization at this time.”
In its decision on the validity of the No Confidence Motion of December 21, 2019, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) had declared the Granger-led administration was a “caretaker” Government.
Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, has promised that three sugar estates would be reopened if his party forms the next Government.
This is despite the fact that they were closed due to a burgeoning deficit. The estates were haemorrhaging billions of dollars.
Jagdeo had said that the cost to close the sugar estates is far greater than the cost to leave them open and subsidise them.
The PPP general secretary had said that, prior to the government’s decision to close the estates, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had indicated that several studies should have been done, and that the PPP had advocated for those studies to be conducted.
“We said this is not closing a small shop. Thousands of people’s lives are involved. The wellbeing of our economy is involved because sugar is so integrated into so many other aspects of our lives that we sometimes don’t see.”
The IMF is one of the many institutions that advocated for Guyana to reduce the size of its sugar industry since it was too costly to upkeep production at competitive rates.
Following this advice, the APNU+AFC administration closed four estates, which displaced over 4,000 sugar workers.
During a press conference in January, Jagdeo had said: “Use the oil and gas money in the future to find other alternative jobs and then you can move out, or you bring in private participation into the sugar industry.
“Eventually, you can, without losing the sugar industry, shutting it down, you get a new owner. That was our approach to the whole matter. And it’s still a viable one.”
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) is using three estates for production – Blairmont and Albion in Berbice and Uitvlugt in West Demerara.
The remaining four estates, Wales (West Bank Demerara); Enmore (East Demerara) and Rose Hall and Skeldon (East Berbice), are up for offers of divestment and privatization.
The National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited’s Special Purpose Unit had said that a group of Ghanaian, Guyanese and Indian businessmen were likely to purchase the Rose Hall Estate by last July.