Dear Editor,
I share the concerns of all those who have expressed their deep concerns on ‘Use Diamond Land for cane to feed ethanol plant’ in Stabroek News, December 13. Since the closure of a brand new sugar factory at Plantation Diamond during the Burnham years, GuySuCo and its shareholders prospered with its land, buildings and other inheritances. Now we are told once again that Diamond Estate will enter another phase of dismemberment, selling good production land for unknown uses to unknown beneficiaries.
These are the sugar lands that have kept families together for years. It would be a huge sacrifice for Guyanese to fragment its production base and give up the potential for gaining a new ethanol-based chemical industry.
Families could thrive living around a new industry, with a capacity to link rail transportation from the East Coast to East Bank as ethanol production expands. Just imagine the value-added and happiness this would bring to the people of Guyana.
The sugar land capacity and layout stretching from Demerara to the backlands of the East Coast embody a comparative advantage that Guyana has for producing and transporting industrial and household ethanol – fuel, beverages, antiseptic compounds, and the base of other organic compounds.
A mere temporary shortage of cash is reportedly causing GuySuCo to take drastic measures to parcel and sell part of the producing assets that the company finds itself owning – its fortune. Guysuco’s temporary cash-flow difficulties at this time should be tackled by a vibrant local banking system loan endorsing its current and future management. Selling land to pay the company’s current account debt is cutting into the heart of Guyana’s future in agricultural-industrial development. It also cuts into the company’s own ability to innovate and create a new industrial base within Guyana’s chemical industrial complex.
Such a large company should consider other ways of resolving its temporary cash-flow problems. For example, it could cut overseas marketing expenses and other foreign-based management activities before even thinking of parting with land endowments that truly belong to sugar workers and their families. GuySuCo should be a tenant on sugar lands and not the bona fide owner of sugar lands.
Several years ago we had looked forward to the Puerto Rican model for development. That country was earmarked as the hub for manufacturing legal prescription drugs to supply to the United States after sugar plantations were closed in the island.
The opportunity faded as financial services overtook the real brick and mortar approach to economic development. The end result was more emigration to the US. This is similar to the population displacement following the closure of Plantation Diamond and other sugar estates in Guyana.
Alternative uses and profitable activities are available that can make Guyana and GuySuCo viable in the long run. Plantation Diamond and its surrounding canefields have the potential to launch a major agro-chemical chemical industry to industrialize around the closed sugar factory and turn the county around into a prosperous landscape. Part of the responsibilities of transferring sugar land to a private corporation like GuySuCo and its owners or managers should be leadership in industrial development in Guyana.
The thousands of apprentices and scholarships that Bookers Guyana made to the sugar workers and their families were not promises. It is unfortunate that GuySuCo is crying out for pain under temporary cash-flow difficulties that brought it down its last bit of money – a few million dollars here and there.
Could the University of Guyana play a major role in management and research and development? I often wondered about our science potential as I taught chemistry, physics, biology, Spanish, and maths at Covent Garden Secondary School near Plantation Diamond Estate. Finally, if we are not sure on how to secure our production base, we should seek advice and look to the land of our national hero Kofi, from Ghana, where national patrimony, land tenure, and land distribution play a major role in the prosperity of Ghanaian citizens.
Yours faithfully,
Ganga Prasad Ramdas
