Dear Editor,
In the Stabroek News of March 29, there is an article entitled ‘Sugar Industry’s problems bigger then Skeldon.’ It’s the only thing in this entire report on what Mr Jagdeo said at Freedom House on March 28, with which I agree.
Like the media, Mr Jagdeo keeps harping on the Skeldon factory being a failure; actually that is not strictly factual, the problem is that he bought a factory with a 350 ton an hour mill, when there was a 100 ton an hour mill at Skeldon and the supply of cane had to be increased from 2400 tons of cane per day to nearly 8500 tonnes per day. We told him that it cannot be done, and it has now been established that it cannot be done.
Also it seemed to have completely escaped the attention of everyone that the labour force in the industry was dwindling rapidly, since it was 28,000 in 1992 and it had dropped to 16,000 by 2001. Let’s understand this, the PPP gets their major support from the sugar and rice areas; they keep attacking the opposition about anything we say about the sugar industry, since they want to keep their support in the sugar belt, but how did they reduce the workforce from 28,000 to 16,000 in 9 years without paying one cent in severance or any other type of compensation to them? If these are the facts, and they are, then one can easily conclude that the PPP has done irreparable harm to the industry and has reduced the amount of people working in it by 57 per cent in the first 10 years after they got into power. And in March of 2015, Mr Jagdeo is telling me, “What do we do? Do we get out of sugar? If we get out the entire Berbice region almost everyone will be affected so we have to find a way.” It completely escapes him that he has already gotten rid of 57 per cent of the industry’s workforce. Apparently if you are a sugar worker in Demerara according to this statement, you are not really part of the sugar industry. It’s not just a slip of the tongue, Editor, it’s the way he thinks. Berbice is their sacred cow but the deception there has been just as bad as in the bauxite and rice areas.
In addition, and more importantly, to begin an expansion like this given that the EU had announced that they were going to remove the subsidy of our sugar by more than 30% starting in 2006, and we still went ahead with this foolhardy expansion project is unbelievable. I still can’t believe it.
That they went out and bought the worst factory on the face of the earth is irrelevant; it would have failed even if they had bought the best factory on the planet, and it was Mr Jagdeo who decided not to buy the factory from Walchandnagar in India and to buy it through a Chinese contracting company which did not manufacture factories and which did not have a track record in building sugar cane mills. Editor, Walchandnagar Industries Limited (WIL) was going to supply the factory, turnkey, for US$35 million less than the Chinese. Wikipedia says about this company: “WIL manufactures in addition to sugar mills heavy engineering products and machinery, and provides EPC and turnkey project services…”
This company told Mr Jagdeo that they had built 40, 350 tons per hour sugar cane factories and expanded 40 more to that capacity, and he disregarded it.
The newspaper article quotes him as saying he needs new varieties and increased productivity; that the industry needs to be revamped. Well, my question is who is going to revamp it? Not the board. He says that the government was prepared to work on it and support it like they did the bauxite communities. Could he be referring to the same communities which he sold out to the Russians and the Chinese? I could be wrong, but it is my opinion that the government just passed on the problems of the bauxite industry to private owners, and not the Americans and Canadians, but the Russians and the Chinese whose poor track record with regard to their workforce is legendary.
I will close with this nonsense from GuySuCo. On Friday, March 27, they announced that they would soon be going to submit for the public a revised 2014 to 2107 business plan. This is the beginning of 2015 and they already have to revise their original plan less than one year after they submitted it, and this is the fourth time we have seen this 2014 plan revised. Who do these people think we are?
Here is my prediction: on May 11 the new GuySuCo plan will be obsolete, as have all of their plans been to date, but by June 31 we will present the nation with a workable plan, which will make sense and provide security for the sugar workers.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
