Dear Editor,
I am moved, by Tony Vieira’s letter (`The amount paid out for the bail-out of GuySuCo cannot equate with what sugar has given us over the centuries’) in SN yesterday, to mention a little of what I have learned on related topics of tropical agriculture and electrical generation.
Our sugar industry developed on a model of centralised management of large-scale planting and processing. This has so focussed us on large investment that very few in Guyana are aware that in many countries profitable natural sweeteners are made from sugarcane using cheap equipment at village level. We can get adaptable models of small-scale technologies from India, ancestral home of the majority of our sugar workers, and from our neighbours Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia. But I expect GuySuCo will say it’s not for them to propose new uses for sugar lands outside the central command-and-control style that rules all Guyanese … including GAWU.
Now the economics of sugar have moved on, as predicted 10 years ago by the EU assistance programme, but diversification has never been pursued into other crops that exploit the comparative advantages of our climate and location. Now we are distracted by the chimera of petroleum oil, so we pay no attention to the possibilities of bio-energy crops that can be grown, processed and used for electrical generation at an appropriate local scale, giving direct benefits at the village level.
I will confess, Editor, that my own ideological tendency, for distributed rather than concentrated economic and civil power, makes me prefer small-scale agriculture as widely diversified as practicable. It is in local groups that we discover the many fruits of working together to face common challenges through unity in diversity. Economies of scale in infrastructural and marketing investments can be secured through mutual collaboration and sharing between small units. And with cheap electricity they produce themselves, what prospects for local agri-processors, demonstrating the benefits of working participation. Beyond money earnings, dare I mention Social Cohesion?
The economic advantages given to cooperatives by our constitution and our law, symbolized by the very name of our Cooperative Republic, are lost through short-sighted neglect and partisan leadership. In the name of social order, decision-making has been usurped from those whose daily benefits are directly affected, by leaders removed from our day-to-day economic enterprise. This is only one way in which we suffer from consolidation of power in the hands of politicians. It is not too cynical to see this tendency as related to my remark of ten years ago that political power in Guyana equates to the power to get personally rich. Against all hopes and promises we see that observation as still valid today.
This is compounded, at most levels of business and everyday life, by the fact that the use of new information is neglected by our culture. Nobody reads beyond the second paragraph; nobody listens beyond the second sentence. Most of us are too busy trying to get rich or richer the best way we know how, to give laborious thought to any promise of a better way that doesn’t spring from within our privileged inner circle. And some of us are in despair at the Augean scale of the messes we have to deal with.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
