How can the persons responsible for the deterioration of sugar be trusted with its revival?

Dear Editor,

President Donald Ramotar announced at the PPP Albion Rally on Sunday a revival plan by his team for the sugar industry. How can we ask the persons who situated the sugar industry into a developmental coma, to now revive the sugar industry? The facts will show that it is the Jagdeo/Ramotar regime that got Guysuco in the Accident and Emergency Unit.

Here are some facts:

  1. The Jagdeo regime with Ramotar on the Guysuco’s Board, bypassed a seasoned Indian company to construct this Skeldon Factory. Walchandnagar Industries Ltd has built over 70 sugar factories across the world from Vietnam to Colombia. The proposal from this Indian company was some $7 billion cheaper than what the Chinese charged.

The Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal chose a Chinese builder who had no track record on building sugar factories. Actually, Skeldon was their first job at constructing a sugar factory. Guyana was their pilot case and our taxpayers have paid the hefty sum of $44 billion for them to learn how to build a sugar factory. End result? A factory that continues to drain the industry of vital financial resources because it was poorly constructed using untested technology!

  1. To illustrate this point the 60 year old British built factory at Skeldon (which the Donald Ramotar Board of Directors moth-balled), was using 12 tonnes of cane to produce 1 tonne of sugar. The new, so-called “state of the art” Chinese factory now uses more than twice as much cane to do the same job – 26 tonnes. This inefficiency from the Chinese factory created a direct loss to the industry of $0.9 billion and $1.1 billion in 2013 and 2014 respectively.
  2. In 2009, the Jagdeo/Ramotar regime lost $1.6 billion from the European Union (EU) because of their late submission of the Sugar Action Plan. That is money lost forever by the sugar industry and it will never return.
  3. The Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal rejected the 3-year forward contract from the EU to buy our sugar at a fixed price for 3 years. The financial loss for this horrible PPP decision? $14 billion in annual loses since 2012.

But the sugar workers know these facts and they know who “bruk-up” the sugar industry. The sugar workers know who continues to engender conditions for the pauperization of the sugar belt and it is the Jagdeo/Ramotar-led PPP cabal.

I therefore call on Donald Ramotar to be honest with the people. They knew since 1993 that the EU was going to decrease the price paid for sugar by 36 percent and they got 10 years from the EU to put their house in order with billions in support financing to help with the transition.

As per normal, the Jagdeo/Ramotar PPP used the miseries and risks in the sugar industry to craft a deal to feed their greedy ambitions. This action from the Jagdeo/Ramotar cabal placed the long term well-being of the sugar industry at risk.

So let them not fool you again, it is not the EU or the opposition that placed the welfare of the sugar worker at risk. This is all the doing of the Jagdeo /Ramotar cabal. They are hoping to build many more mansion on your sweat.

Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh