The government is anticipating that the defects in the troubled multi-million dollar Skeldon Sugar factory will be remedied this year, Agriculture Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy says.
“I expect most if not all defects would be remedied in 2012,” Ramsammy told the National Assembly on Wednesday evening while making his contribution to this year’s budget debate. “It is true that the Skeldon Factory is a major concern,” Ramsammy said while underscoring government’s commitment to dealing with the challenges facing the facility and the industry as a whole. The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), he said, has been successfully confronting the challenges facing the industry.
Ramsammy, meanwhile, said that the $4B subsidy that the government has allocated for GuySuCo in this year’s budget “is the right thing to do”. “This is the industry that supported Guyana in bad times,” an animated Ramsammy said, noting that for several years the sugar levy was heavily utilized to support Guyana’s expenditure.
The sugar corporation earlier this month announced that major rehabilitation works including the redesigning and re-engineering of the factory were being undertaken as the Corporation anticipates a significant increase in production at the factory next year. According to a statement from GuySuCo, the Corporation is working with reputable international engineering experts and technical professionals in the area of diffusion technology as well as agricultural specialists and has identified the major factors that are preventing the estate from reaching its full potential and design capacity. In September last year, the corporation had noted that a South African firm was assisting the entity in making the factory fully operable.
The US$200M Skeldon sugar factory was unveiled by the government to boost production to 300,000 tonnes and over per annum, however the factory was plagued by numerous problems from the very start. The Skeldon factory was built by China National Technology Import and Export Corp (CNTIC) in what was meant to be a turn key project.
Work on the factory began in 2005 and it was expected that the project would have been completed by October 2007. The commissioning date was pushed back several times until the end of 2008. The turn key contract would have seen GuySuCo taking charge of its running after the commissioning but CNTIC remained on site trying to fix serious problems that arose. Meanwhile, Ramsammy on Wednesday said that while critics seek to place GuySuCo’s woes solely on poor management this was unfair since the removal of preferential markets for its sugar and other factors have had a significant role to play in the difficulties being experienced. He commended sugar workers saying that were it not for them, the industry would have collapsed.
In speaking about other positives in the sugar sector, Ramsammy said that the US$12.5 million Enmore Packing plant was fully functioning, while noting that the present challenge is supplying it with enough sugar.
