Sugar production to date is about 219,000 tonnes and the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) will not meet its revised 2012 production target of 236,000 tonnes, Minister of Agriculture, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy says.
The performance of the sugar industry this year marks yet another year where GuySuCo has failed to meet its production targets. Last year, the industry managed 237,000 tonnes of sugar, which was below the 282,000 tonnes revised target set mid-2011. It blamed the outcome on several factors, including low worker turnout as well as the prevailing weather conditions.
For this year, the corporation initially set a sugar production target of 265,000 tonnes but later revised this to 236,000 tonnes—a reduction of 30,000 tonnes. However, the industry said that several problems, including low worker turnout, industrial action and inclement weather saw the first crop this year slipping to a new low at 71,146 tonnes—far lower than the 106,000 tonnes which was recorded at the end of the first crop in 2011.
When contacted today, Ramsammy said that sugar production to date was at about 219, 000 tonnes and confirmed that the target for 2012 will not be met.
The sugar industry has struggled with production in recent years. Last year’s production figure was set at 300,000 tonnes at the beginning of the first crop before being revised midway through the year. In 2010, GuySuCo had set the figure at 264,000 tonnes but fell short of that target too at 233,000 tonnes. In 2009, the corporation had set its target at 250,000 tonnes and corporation also fell short of the target by producing 226,000 tonnes.
In October, Ramsammy had expressed optimism that the target would have been met and surpassed.
The sugar workers union, the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) has said that GuySuCo needs to be restructured and its planting methods have to be addressed. It had added that the unavailability of canes needed to be tackled. The union’s president Komal Chand last yearend also called for experts to be brought into the sugar corporation to save the industry.
In his column for the Sunday Stabroek, economist Dr. Clive Thomas has said that over the past decade the trend has been for less sugar to be produced annually, while the cost of production continually rises. “GuySuCo’s continued production of less sugar annually at a higher unit price has depended on its being able to mobilize bailout funding from the state and the international community. The latter has come mainly as financial support under the European Union’s (EU) Sugar Accompanying Measures, designed to compensate for its unilateral denunciation of the Sugar Protocol (SP),” he wrote earlier this month.
Total production for each of the last four years falls far short of the 300,000 to 350,000-tonnes which GuySuCo’s recovery blueprint had been projecting, moving up to 450,000 tonnes per annum. The blueprint was presented in April 2009. The poor performance of the flagship Skeldon estate has also been cited as one of the major problems in the industry.
