Guyana and the Wider World

Last week’s column considered whether Guyana should support national debt relief as compensatory payment from slave-owning European countries to slave descendants residing in the region.

Introduction At the request of several readers today’s column will evaluate the proposal which is finding favour in several highly-indebted Caricom countries for the payment of slavery reparations by the former slave-owning countries to slave descendants in the region, to be made in the form of national debt relief.

Introduction   Alongside the debates about the roles/functions of government in the Guyana economy, there has been another equally enduring economic debate as to whether presently the government is too big, too little, or just about right-sized.

Introduction Thus far I have identified two of what have been described in the economic literature as the “four essential roles or functions governments perform in the economy.”

Introduction Last week’s column ended my extended presentation on the state of the sugar industry, which had begun on January 5 of this year.

The way forward for sugar Part 1   Introduction In this column and next week’s, I shall undertake the final task in this series on Guyana’s sugar industry.

Today’s column examines the fourth and last of the ‘other proposals,’ which aim at finding a way forward for the sugar industry.

Privatization   This week I shall continue with the presentation of the second and third ‘other proposals.’

Introduction Starting today I shall focus on the way forward for Guyana’s sugar industry.

Introduction   Historically the sugar industry developed in Guyana because of its favourable agro-climatic coastal features.

Introduction Before considering options for the way forward in the sugar industry, I shall first examine challenges posed by its underperformance as revealed in the behaviour of the standard performance measures since the 1990s as well as last week’s analysis of Guysuco’s predicament.

Introduction   The serious weaknesses and massive underperformance of Guyana’s sugar industry during the past two to three decades were revealed in previous columns, through an evaluation of six standard performance measures that are routinely applied to the assessment of sugar industries.

This week I begin with a wrap-up discussion of factory performance measures as revealed at the level of the eight individual estates.

This week’s column concludes consideration of the sugar industry’s land productivity measure; that is tonnes cane (TC) per hectare (HA) of harvested land.

Culture of losses GuySuCo is a state-owned corporation. Readers already have in their possession firm details of how deeply mired it is in what I have termed “a sea of losses and indebtedness” (annual losses of about $6 billion and outstanding debt of $90 billion in 2013).

Introduction   When evaluating Guysuco’s profitability and/or losses as a performance indicator the conclusion reached was that the corporation has been “mired in a sea of losses and indebtedness since the 2000s.”

From a dynamic perspective, over the medium to long-term the profitability of the sugar industry as a whole, and GuySuCo in particular, is more than any other variable, the best representative indicator of its sustainability as a commercial venture.

In this week’s column I intended to conclude the evaluation of costs as a performance indicator.

I had reported a few weeks ago in this series data comparing the unit cost of sugar production for Caricom producers in 2005.

Last week’s column introduced six performance indicators for the sugar industry, which I will examine in coming weeks: production, costs, profitability, land productivity, factory productivity, and combined (land and factory) productivity, in that order.