The government is reopening certain sugar estates, although they have not, as yet, spelt out what their larger plan for the industry is. They seem to suffer no embarrassment about the fact that it was on their previous watch that sugar went into such dramatic decline, despite the adjustment assistance provided by the EU after it began the withdrawal of its trade preference arrangements. The unbelievably expensive Skeldon factory which was intended as a key component in turning the industry around emerged as possibly the biggest white elephant this country has ever seen.
No one needs to be told that Guyana produces sugar at well above world market prices, and President Irfaan Ali has not given the public, let alone the sugar workers, much of an inkling about how this inherent handicap can be overcome and profitability achieved. In a letter to this newspaper earlier this month, former president Mr Donald Ramotar said that the challenge in this regard was “fundamentally managerial”, and that the high cost of production had a lot to do with inefficiencies at the factories. He was of the view that Guyana could move to semi-mechanisation, never mind, it seems, the demonstrated limitations of the Skeldon mechanisation project.
And then there was more wishful thinking. The raw sugar price would not always be low, he wrote, since shortages would be created as a consequence of the number of countries going out of sugar; in due course this would send prices up again. Added to this he expressed himself not in favour of raw sugar production, preferring instead that we move to value added. He might remember that this too had been attempted by his government in the case of the Enmore Packaging Plant, which was something less than a success story. In any case, Mr Ramotar comes with baggage in the form of all those years spent on the GuySuCo Board when the industry started to slide relentlessly into the red.
Mr Tony Vieira, with acknowledged experience in sugar has written many times on the greater viability of using sugar cane biomass for the manufacture of ethanol, instead of the production of sugar. It would also, he has argued, require much less power than the manufacture of sugar, which would open other options for the use of bagasse. Citing recent studies GAWU General Secretary Seepaul Narine has disputed that ethanol production is financially viable, given the current low oil price, but that notwithstanding, he has suggested that the industry’s demonstration ethanol plant at Albion could be utilised to study ethanol yields. For his part, Mr Ramotar suggests that factories should be arranged so they could switch quickly from sugar to ethanol, depending on prevailing prices. He does not venture an opinion on what should happen if neither proves remunerative.
There have been other suggestions in the past in relation to the use of cane, one of them, emanating from IAST, proposing the manufacture of briquettes from bagasse. Mr Vieira has written that for a number of reasons this idea is simply not workable.
But now a new suggestion has materialised in relation to the economic use of bagasse. A review in this week’s Economist of an article appearing in the journal Matter reports a mechanical engineer at Northeastern University in Boston as claiming that it is “an excellent – and biodegradable – replacement for the plastic used for disposable food containers such as coffee cups.” The magazine reported that this was not the first time such an idea had been put forward, but earlier experiments had shown the bagasse-based substance did not survive contact with liquids. Dr Zhu, the proponent of this latest excursion into the potential use of sugar cane, has overcome the problem by blending a small amount of bamboo pulp into the bagasse.
Dr Zhu and her colleagues tested their cup made of this new material with hot oil as well as water heated almost to boiling point, and it survived intact for almost two hours. While this is not as long as a plastic cup, says the Economist, it is long enough for all practical purposes. In addition it is twice as strong as a plastic cup. Its great virtue in the modern world, of course, is its biodegradability, since when a cup was buried in the ground, half of it had already rotted away within two months.
Significantly, the magazine reported Dr Zhu as estimating that a tonne of bagasse cups would cost $2,333. This compares to the $4,750 a tonne that biodegradable polylactic acid cups cost, and only a little more than plastic cups at $2,177 a tonne. This then, she says, would make bagasse the choice for manufacturing coffee cups, straws, disposable plates, lightweight cutlery, and so on. Best of all, after use “these could be dumped in landfills with a clear conscience.”
This proposal is clearly still at the experimental stage. However, in an ideal world one might dream that the government would seek to explore the possibilities of collaboration at some level, perhaps by making local facilities available for the continuation of the experiment on a larger scale. This may not be feasible, but at least the administration – and the sugar union – should be keeping track of all novel developments in the field with a view to their potential for adaptation locally.
