Dear Editor,
Over the past several months, the Guyana Sugar Corpor-ation has been lambasted in the press for poor management. No doubt some of these criticisms were deserved. It is not my intention to absolve the management of their fair share of the blame. What I do not understand is the corporation’s inability or unwillingness to give its side of the story.
There is no doubt that GuySuCo has been encountering difficult times over the past few years but much of it has got nothing to do with bad management.
I worked in GuySuCo in a critical management position from 1997-2000. I know that the corporation uses a vast amount of steel products (sheets, chains etc). The price of steel has skyrocketed over the past few years. It also uses a large quantity of fertilizers, chemicals, etc, in its cane cultivation.
The price of these has also gone up exponentially. It also uses millions of polyethylene bags for sugar packaging. The cost of these also would have gone up significantly with the cost of crude oil. When you add the increasing cost of labour you can see that the operational costs of the corporation would have ballooned.
GuySuCo is in no position to increase the selling price of its product (sugar) so these additional costs would directly and negatively impact their bottom line.
I have not seen the corporation’s Annual Report of recent years, and maybe these impacts have been reported and quantified therein. However, the corporation should not forget that every citizen of Guyana is a shareholder in GuySuCo through the Government of Guyana, and they should communicate to them as well. The limited circulation of the Annual Report does not achieve this purpose.
What is the Communica-tions Department doing? Why is the Chief Executive’s office not doing something about this? Why isn’t the Chairman?
Your faithfully,
Omkar Suchit
