Sugar – A State of Emergency

Aug 15, 2019 Letters

---

DEAR EDITOR,

It is not unusual for the sugar industry of Guyana to be under siege, whether it was privately owned or nationalised. The largest employer in Guyana (and the Caribbean) has however learnt to ‘roll with the punches’. Yet it has never experienced such subversion as to which its current management has been subjected over the last two years or more.
Effectively at the end of 2017, by a most illogical organisational mechanism, the industry was reduced from seven estates to three – the latter being Albion/PM and Blairmont Estates in Berbice; and Uitvlugt Estate in West Demerara.
Wales Estate in the adjoining area had already been closed at the end of 2016; preceding the closure of Skeldon and Rose Hall Estates in Berbice, and East Demerara Estate (Enmore). It was advised at the end of 2017 that the last three locations were placed under an agency named the Special Purpose Unit of NICIL, whose Board reported to the Ministry of Finance.
What this construct substantively articulated was that the four named locations would be kept operational as far as possible, purportedly as an incentive to prospective investors interested in producing specifically sugar.
Unfortunately the proposed exercise was undermined by two fundamental misconceptions:
i) How would it be possible to maintain production at locations from which most of the relevant skills and competencies had been severed?
In this connection, there was the fallacy of having to rehire and pay those who were in the process of receiving their terminal benefits in tranches.
ii) The baseless assumption that total strangers could in fact manage a number of patently defective organisational systems, at whatever cost – to attract the putative seventy prospective interested parties announced to a meeting with GAWU and NAACIE at East Demerara Estate (Enmore) in 2017.
At the time of writing approximately two years later, the indications are that just two investors may be still interested – an understandable reduction, since there has been no public announcement of sugar production resulting from the identifiable ‘SPU’ estates.
Meantime, with the current political distractions, it would appear that no attention is being paid to any deadline for the privatisation of the failed estates.
iii) It is as if the SPU’s Terms of Reference do not have a terminal date for successful implementation of the process, that is, of their publicised misbehaviours towards GuySuCo, would not serve as a disincentive to what remaining investors there may be.
In the meantime, all the concerned parties (at the highest level) must take into consideration where and how the critical human resources will be available to operate the individual vested sugar Estates. For it must be realised that of the severed personnel who have not yet found alternative work, others would hardly be interested in returning to new suspect management systems, certainly without similar conditions to their previous employment (particularly health benefits).
In the meantime, there is the acrimonious relationship existing between an old dedicated GuySuCo management team and the new intemperate pioneers. One area of dispute is La Bonne Intention (LBI) Estate, already the site of GuySuCo’s Head Office.
When the SPU sought office space there, it was graciously proffered, by a management who did not expect the squatters would assert ownership of the LBI compound, most likely with the mistaken understanding that LBI was actually a component of the East Demerara Estate.
History in fact shows that the estate operations were in fact closed by the previous administration since 2011. Most of the resident staff required for the new configuration were transferred to Enmore Estate or resorted to their own homes.
So that to all intents and purposes, the LBI compound could not be assumed to be part of the property to be transitioned from the Sugar Corporation to a virtual tenant. There would have had to be a relevant legal execution to make such a transfer a reality.
Indeed, the property was not included amongst those vested in NICIL via the Vesting Order of 2017, by the Minister of Finance – effectively divorcing the prospective privatised sugar industry from under the purview of the Ministry of Agriculture – thus constructing two or more competitive sugar economies.
So that stories regarding the revival of the swimming pool – a part of the building which housed the extant training facility (no longer considered to be the staff social resort) – by the new arrivals, raised questions about the legitimacy of the residency which they claimed.
Somehow, however, the related decision-makers, while overlooking any real promise of privatisation – for the declared purposes of producing sugar – are reducing the possibilities for investment by allowing technically misguided personnel to dispose of components of the very Estate factories as ‘scrap metal’.
Meantime, recent information would suggest that these newcomers have shown little inclination of a reconciliation with their (unofficial) landlords, who so far as the public is concerned, do not appear to have taken a firm legal position to quell the unnecessary turbulence.
From this writer’s perspective, there must be insistence that LBI, where GuySuCo’s Head Office is located, belongs only to GuySuCo; and its staff members must be allowed to feel and remain secure.
It is not as if the ‘Tenants’ are there permanently, for presumably it is well understood that their ‘special purpose’ having been fulfilled (or having failed), it will be logical for their principals to recall them to their base.
This submission is therefore intended to help clarify, for the benefit of the public, the confusion which appears to surround the SPU in the first instance, and its effect on the management of GuySuCo in the second instance.
But more fundamentally, all must ponder the wisdom or otherwise of the initial strategy, and the growing futility of the exercise of an SPU.
Meanwhile, some concern must be shown for the debilitating effect this sterile period has had on the morale of those who sustain the legacy of the sugar industry.
Yours faithfully
E.B. John

---

---