Dear Editor,
So they are going to bury Wales Estate.
Wales holds special memories and a historical significance for me. My great grandfather was one of the first indentured laborers to step off the SS Hesperus at Vreed-en-Hoop at the behest of John Gladstone, owner of Plantation Belle Vue, the first person to bring Indian indentured labourers to British Guiana in 1838. My forefather was bound to Belle Vue, and there he stayed after completing his indentureship, and so did his son and grandson, (my father) until Belle Vue was annexed to Plantation Wales. In the mid 1940s, Plantation Belle Vue, its logies, hospital and factory were ploughed down and my father and others offered housing in a new scheme that was opening, called Patentia. Later, in the mid-fifties, Plantation Belle Vue became Bellevue Pilot Scheme. My foreparents were tied to the cane roots at Wales. And so was I until I was fifteen when I suffered a hernia in the canefield, and that changed my destiny. Nevertheless there were heart-rending memories. So this closure of Wales is the closure of a very long chapter in history. But I must now put away childish things, for, as one literally brought up at the feet of Professor Clive Thomas (whom I must credit for helping me earn my economics degree in three years), I must look at things purely from an economic and objective point of view.
So, in the circumstances, I agree. Wales has to be closed. But not for some of the reasons presented by the high profile, mightily expensive CoI which stated that:
o 60% of its D&I infrastructure is run down;
o 75% of the bridges are in poor shape;
o the cultivation is also in poor condition;
o the factory is old and in need of major investment.
Indeed, three of these four criteria are directly related to local managerial incompetence, and improper central directorial monitoring. And we know that closure of the cane sugar industry in Guyana is being dictated, I would say 99 per cent by exogenous variables, not local entrepreneurial incompetence.
The real reason the cane sugar industry has to be closed in Guyana, beginning with the weakest link, Wales, is because it is uneconomical to operate without a perpetual heavy government subsidy. It costs in excess of 42 cents to produce a pound of sugar which we can only sell for 16 cents. So the more sugar we produce the deeper we get into debt! We need to give the true facts to the people so that political entrepreneurs will not take advantage of the workers’ sentiments and political affiliation. The cane sugar industry in nearly every country in the world is being subsidized by its respective government, including Domino Sugar in the USA. We in Guyana subsidize sugar because if we throw 1600 people out of work from Wales, we are actually affecting, directly and indirectly, 5000 families. This alone could very well shrink the GDP by 1-2 per cent. That is why sugar has had to be subsidized all the time. It is different from electricity subsidization.
The main reason the cost of production is so high is because labour actually accounts for over 60 per cent of the cost of production. Labour in Guyana is alienated from the means of production, and thus is able to hold the industry at ransom ‒ even in the best of times under their own government.
Editor, closing Wales and throwing 5000 families in the cold is a very dangerous thing. You see, there are two economies operating in Wales: Sugar is the first economy and drugs, the second. Can you imagine what effect shutting down the first economy will have on the second, throwing 5000 families into nowhere… along with the side effects – murder, suicide, robbery, etc, etc?
But, agreed, Wales must be closed.
And speaking flippantly, the CoI or whichever lords are sitting in Georgetown, who are themselves voluntarily alienated from labour, as well as from that other important factor of production ‒ land, say: “Agricultural workers at Wales will be absorbed by Uitvlugt up to the extent of suitable vacancies on that location. Surplus labour would have to be made redundant. The same principle would apply to the other departments.” What verbiage! The litany sounds like Shakespeare in the park! How can they apply some universal plaster to such a special and unique locality as Wales? Obviously fancy words for dumping.
Editor, I have known Wales for sixty-six years now. For simple agricultural purposes let us define Wales Economic Basin as the area from Canal One to Le Harmonie, a riverain village about ten miles south of Canal One and consisting of about 20000 acres of prime agricultural land of which about 11000 are or were under cane cultivation. First of all, Wales is uniquely more demographically heterogeneous than any other sugar estate. For this reason it experiences fewer strikes and civil unrest. In the early-sixties Wales was probably the only estate that resisted the call for ethnic violence. Secondly, the soil in the Wales Economic Basin is equally suitable for sugar cane as it is for a host of other fruit crops and vegetables ‒ more than any other sugar estate. At one time the Polders were the centre of cocoa, coffee, pineapple and citrus production in the Caribbean. They were the fruit basket of the Caribbean.
The biggest disaster to happen was when hundreds of farmers, and Wales Estate itself, ploughed down their coffee, cocoa, breadfruit, pineapple and citrus trees to plant sugar cane when sugar prices peaked in the mid-sixties. Wales Estate was not only producing and exporting cocoa, but it even used to operate a viable dairy farm at one time, and every pregnant and lactating mother was given a free pint of milk up to the mid-sixties.
Why therefore cannot GuySuCo invest the $1.9 billion that they would have otherwise sunk into a lost cause ‒ the Wales sugar estate ‒ into a short to long-term diversification programme by giving soft loans to farmers, cane-cutters and the so called “redundant” labour so that they can lease the cane lands that Wales would inevitably otherwise abandon, to re-cultivate the other crops aforementioned? The leasing, I have previously explained in several letters on GuySuCo and diversification, could be conditioned to a productivity/investment ratio, and only renewed upon favourable returns.
I fail to see why former sugar workers, once alienated from the means of production to the point of sabotaging those means, and now becoming controllers of these means, cannot increase the productivity of all factors of production, since it means increasing their personal wealth and welfare, as they become masters of their own destiny. I fail to see why they cannot produce sugar and milk and cocoa, and rice, and all these turned into rice pudding, chocolate and confectionery. You know something? All this used to be done by cottage industries when I was growing up in Wales. I fail to see why the Wales Economic Basin cannot regain its reputation as the Fruit Basket of the Caribbean.
Either the government starts organizing the people to return to the land whence all true wealth, moral values, physical strength and spiritual fulfilment originate, or we continue to haemorrhage our population through migration, suicide, murder, road carnage, cancer, AIDS and other maladies of modernization. Even Stephen Hawkins recently expressed similar pessimism about the future of mankind should we not return to basics.
Yours faithfully,
Gokarran David Sukhdeo
