Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo on Sunday dropped a broad hint that there would be no revival of sugar at the Skeldon estate on the scale that had been promised by the government and envisaged by Corentyne residents.
With the infrastructure at the Guyana Sugar Corporation’s (GuySuCo) Skeldon estate left to deteriorate under the APNU+AFC government following its closure in 2017, Jagdeo said it will require billions to be invested to rehabilitate the existing infrastructure before hinting at a smaller scale of production.
While he blamed deterioration of equipment between 2015 and 2020 on APNU+AFC, the Skeldon factory had been in strife long before that and was a high cost producer. The ambitious US$200m project inaugurated during the Jagdeo presidency had been widely considered to be a catastrophic failure and underpinned by the initial decision to hire an inexperienced Chinese factory builder. This led to the eventual decision by APNU+AFC to close the estate in 2017. However, in its manifesto, for the 2020 general elections, the PPP/C had vowed to reopen the estate if it won power and it is this expectation that Jagdeo sought to downplay on Saturday in an address to the Corentyne business community.
