As the Guyana Sugar Cor-poration (GuySuCo) struggles with making quotas and fully realising the path to mechanisation, Chief Execu-tive Officer Paul Bhim says that revamping the Port Mourant Training Centre’s curriculum is in the works.
Bhim told Stabroek News that succession planning and engaging workers had to become a priority for the state-owned sugar corporation. Bhim said that GuySuCo “has a huge financial problem… We can’t see ourselves out of it, the labour is dwindling”.
He said the corporation may have acted too slowly in the implementation of large-scale mechanisation operations.
He said there has been a sufficient lag in production because of this among other factors.
Bhim said GuySuCo also suffers because sugar is a weather-reliant industry and the implementation to schedule work during the changing number of opportunity days due to the changing weather pattern had not been fully realised.
GuySuCo’s CEO stated that “we have to retrain our people,” continuing that full-scale mechanisation meant that more skilled workers would be needed. He noted that while the sugar industry may have lagged in the development of mechanisation GuySuCo was committed to ensuring that training and succession planning was in the works.
“When Skeldon was done, we started there. All of the factory workers came from the training programmes,” he said, adding that GuySuCo was looking forward to more programmes and diversification of programmes.
Turning to remuneration, he said, “…because the money is not so much, we can’t pay. It is more… job satisfaction and the bottom line is we can’t pay.
“We can’t pay workers like the mining industry and we have lost a lot of people to other sectors, this is a real problem.”
Bhim said the migration of skilled and trained workers meant that the specialisation of workers and the diversification of programmes being taught were more necessary than ever before. “People aren’t staying with the company… We have a pension scheme, guaranteed medical for family; a plethora of incentives – we have a package, but it is the basic wage that is the problem,” Bhim told Stabroek News. He said that more incentive had to be created and that it could be a jump start to boosting the sector.
GuySuCo’s CEO stated that the corporation has begun to look at the lower-level employees in assessing future plans and considering what type of skills will be relevant for these workers to have when mechanisation is in full swing.
Bhim said succession planning, training and mechanisation were the three main ingredients to reviving the sugar industry.
He said, “If we can produce we can see a way out,” of the corporation’s continuous deficit that regularly requires subventions from the budget. GuySuCo will receive $1 billion from the budget this year.
However, Minister of Agriculture Dr Leslie Ramsammy has assured that GuySuCo’s financing ac-countability needed analysing and as a result the government would not ask the National Assembly to approve any supplementary financing for the state-owned corporation.
