Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter published in the October 29th edition of Stabroek News captioned ‘There are great prospects for sugar industry but success depends on quality of management and top personnel’ written by former President Mr. Donald Ramotar. I will not seek to analyze the contents of this letter from my friend Mr. Ramotar since as recently as April 2020, we had lunch together at the Marriott. I do however want to clarify one statement made by him which clearly refers to me. Where he wrote “One of the members of the (GuySuCo) board has made no secret about what he thinks of the future of the industry. He is of the view that GuySuCo should get out of cane and sugar production”.
As far back as 2015 I had presented a paper to the Commission of Inquiry into the sugar industry, saying that I believe that we are operating at a huge disadvantage in our sugar industry by manufacturing sugar [sucrose] instead of ethanol from our sugar cane. Brazil and Australia which are our main competitors in the international sugar market, are producing sugar at around 12 US cents a pound compared to our nearly 34 US cents a pound. This is due to basically two reasons: 1. They have managed, because they have far less rainfall than Guyana, to almost completely mechanize their industries when we have not and 2. Our high rainfall also makes our canes more vegetative and as a result it is taking nearly 100% more cane in Guyana to make one tonne of sugar compared to Brazil and Australia where they are taking seven or eight tonnes of cane to make one tonne of sugar while GuySuCo is taking [up to week ending 17th October 2020] 13.81 tonnes of cane to make one tonne of sugar!
And here is my math on the matter, in Guyana up to week ending 17th Oct 2020, we ground 918,900 tonnes of cane and made 66,559.9 tonnes of sugar; using 371 US dollars per tonne, which is our average price per tonne at this time, this sugar will earn Guyana 24.7 million US dollars.
Cane sugar is a disaccharide made up of glucose and fructose which exists due to a fragile bond between them which in our case is made worse by the fact that we are still burning our canes and therefore have to get it to the factory within 48 hours after burning or it reverts to the two monosaccharides glucose and fructose and can no longer make sucrose. However, information from international sources tells us that the sugar cane biomass when fermented for 24 hours will produce 22 gallons of ethanol per tonne of sugar cane. To make the 66,559.9 tonnes of sugar we have made so far in 2020, we ground 918,900 tonnes of sugar cane, if the conversion is 22 gallons per tonne of cane [and I have seen nothing which contradicts this] then we would have earned from this amount of cane, 20.215 million gallons of ethanol which is sold in Brazil as fuel for 3 US$ per gallon i.e. we would have earned US$60.65 million. And not US$24.7m total from sugar. You don’t have to be much of a mathematician to see what the difference is. In addition the Brazilian experience tells us that to manufacture alcohol directly from the sugar cane biomass, requires much less power than manufacturing sugar from it. If our factories will be using much less power, then other options for the use of bagasse materialize.
Editor there is also a letter in the same issue on the same day saying that we should not explore aquaculture in Guyana since sugar is so special. In 2019, the sugar industry worldwide, was producing a total of 180 million tonnes at 12.8 cents a pound i.e. it is now a US$72 billion dollar a year industry. At the same time farmed seafood in 2018 earned 236.6 billion US dollars. The aquaculture industry is now nearly four times bigger and much more lucrative than the sugar industry worldwide. And its income per acre will be 10-50 times greater per hectare per annum than growing sugar cane. For Guyana that pond-like layout our ancestors left us with, makes it mandatory that we try to explore aquaculture as a diversification option. Especially since the sugar industry in Guyana is 47,000 hectares, we cannot possibly use 47,000 hectares to grow fish and shrimp, we would need 188,000 workers, 4 employees per hectare.
Finally Editor, I no longer use sucrose sugar since there is a growing scientific lobby for fructose which comprise 50% of the sucrose or cane sugar to be labelled a toxic substance, since the human metabolism appears to have no pathway to digest it, and it is simply stored in the liver as fat. “The scientific data on fructose says it is one of the most egregious components of the western diet, directly contributing to heart disease and diabetes, and associated with cancer and dementia. Nature magazine has just published a scathing indictment of fructose by Dr Lewis Cantley, one of the US’s leading cancer researchers.” It is therefore possible that this matter of insisting on manufacturing sugar will be taken out of our hands completely, in time. As a product, ethanol for alcohol beverage manufacturing, pharmaceutical uses and as a renewable fuel makes it a far more attractive product to market.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
