GAWU President Komal Chand says that GuySuCo will most likely not reach its first crop target of 70,000 tonnes, noting that both the Rose Hall and Albion estates have finished harvesting and were below target.
He said that the first week of harvesting “ended up being average one tonne of sugar for 13.5 tonnes of cane, which is okay”. Chand stated that the second and third week production was along the same amounts, but that the issue has become the amount of cane being planted and harvested.
If GuySuCo fell below 70,000 tonnes it would be one of the lowest first crop figures in recent times.
The Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union’s president told Stabroek News that “like last year they (GuySuCo) didn’t have the amount of cane to produce the 231,000 target”. He continued that while the 2013 target of 240,000 tonnes was more reasonable it may need adjusting depending on the harvests as did last year’s initial target. Chand did say that he hoped last year’s production rate will “hopefully not be the pattern and repeated this year.”
The first crop target in 2012 was a whopping 101,800 tonnes but GuySuCo fell far short of this, mustering 71,100 tonnes of sugar. This year’s first crop target was below the actual achievement last year.
Chand said that the union, the agriculture ministry and GuySuCo “all agree that there is climate change, last year they (GuySuCo) were blaming labour turnout and weather. I think they are trying, but they need to come to grips with the (fact that the) season is short and you can’t start mobilizing farmers when the weather is good…they need strict organization and commitment to start the field work as soon as the weather allows.”
Chand stated that “you have to mobilize during the work opportunities days,” to get the cane out of the fields as quickly as possible and into the factories for grinding. He said that since the amount of cane being grown may not be sufficient it is important for the estates to not have a large percent lost due to spoilage. GAWU’s president stated that GuySuCo management had to take on more responsibility in the growing of cane and the caring of the fields.
Chand further said that farmers needed to be entrusted and GuySuCo needed to do more to rely on the actual farmers. He noted that “Skeldon (factory) has work to be done (on it) so the farmers are taking on more of the strain and GuySuCo has to know that, they have to see that the workers are picking up for what the factory can’t do”. Chand stated that “the investment in Skeldon has already been done, the expert said that the repairs will put it the right way now we can only make this judgement when the factory starts to operate like it should, but for now the labourers have to be relied on”. He said that the Skeldon fields operated last years at 2.8 tonnes of cane per hectare while other estates, which rely on manpower and not mechanisation, were double or triple that amount.
He said that it was a fact that Skeldon has not been operating to full capacity since it was commissioned in 2008. In 2012 alone the factory was responsible for 25% of the entire factory downtime of all seven estates, over 550 hours of lost grinding time was attributed to mechanical issues. Rated at 350 tonnes of cane per hour, the problem-plagued Skeldon factory has only been processing around 190 tonnes of cane per hour.
Chand did say that while GuySuCo had to rely heavily on its labour force the harvesters needed better incentives for the back-breaking workload, “there is indeed competition for the available workers…GuySuCo’s wages must be more competitive to avoid real threat from other employment opportunities.”
During the consideration of the budget estimates Minister of Agriculture Dr Leslie Ramsammy justified the $1B subsidy that GuySuCo would receive on 2013 while noting that the ministry had no plans to seek further supplementary funding throughout the year. Dr Ramsammy also stated that he did not expect the ailing sugar sector to make a profit this year and instead the state-owned company would focus on mechanization.
Dr Ramsammy noted that the mechanization process was not where it should be and as a result of continued failure in executing rescue plans the ministry would be reviewing GuySuCo’s management and its board.
Efforts by Stabroek News to elicit information from GuySuCo on the first crop failed.
In a letter in March this year reviewing GuySuCo’s performance for 2012, former sugar industry executive and former PNCR MP Tony Vieira said:
“The total industry production for the year 2012 was 218,069 tons, the lowest in over two decades. The production of the Skeldon factory was a total of 33,309 tons of sugar. Albion for example produced 54,022 tons. By this time, according to all of GuySuCo’s projections, Skeldon should be producing 100,000 tons of sugar. The disaster that is the Skeldon Sugar Modernisation Project [SSMP] continues and the time has come to ask if it is viable? At the very least a commission of enquiry should be set up to examine what has happened? and what is the way forward if in fact there is one.
For example the losses of sugar at the Skeldon factory are frightening. Sugar is haemorrhaging at this state of the art factory in massive quantities, in the filter press mud 1.18% of the sugar is lost, the highest in the industry, Albion for example was 0.51%. In the molasses 17.49% is lost, again the highest in the industry, Albion for example is 9.40%. The undermined losses at Skeldon were 6.45%, again the highest in the industry, Albion for example was only 1.29%. The boiling house recovery was also unacceptably low. The boiling house efficiency was the lowest in the industry at 88.67% whilst Albion was 99.52%, and the industry average was 97.40%.
The field data is equally depressing. The yield per hectare of sugar at Skeldon was 2.81 tons, the lowest in the industry. Albion by comparison yielded 5.35 tons sugar per hectare in 2012, but compared to our recent 30 years average of 2.5 tons per acre or 6.17 tons sugar per hectare, the industry average in 2012 was only 5 tons sugar per hectare. I won’t even try to show how this compares with Brazil and Australia but taken as a total around the planet the normal production average is more like 10 tons sugar per hectare.
