Dear Editor,
There seems to be a very irrational and misinformed opinion in GuySuCo about how farmers get their canes cut, whilst the estates are experiencing a shortage of labour and can’t harvest their canes on time.
The feeling seems to be that the farmers can be given 800 hectares at Uitvlugt and that magically the farmers will materialise the workforce to maintain and reap this huge acreage from thin air.
This is the kind of raw stupidity which has GuySuCo in the situation it is now in. It is also the kind of raw disregard this government has for the people of Guyana, even their own supporters.
No cane farmer has his own workforce. The workers who do the farmers’ work, including reaping, are GuySuCo’s employees.
Our sugar estates have incentives for their workers which farmers can never match, ie, free medicines and medical aid at the dispensaries on all of the estates, production bonuses, weekly target bonuses, access to a pension scheme, guaranteed out-of-crop employment, protecting them through payments to the NIS scheme, etc.
To qualify for the production bonus and to be kept on the estate’s employee register as a permanent employee, and therefore entitled to the benefits the sugar industry’s employees are enjoying, a sugar worker must work a certain percentage of the days available to him within the crop.
And the workers watch the qualifications very carefully; but if they work 5 days at the estate to maintain their qualification they can, and do, work the other 2 days at the farmers’ plots to earn tax-free dollars since if they worked on the estates they would have to pay higher taxes since their earnings per week would be more. Also there is no evidence that farmers pay NIS for the labourers cutting their canes. Numerous estate workers who get hurt when cutting farmers’ canes claim NIS as if they were harvesting the estates’ canes. Of course there will be, and usually are, other incentives a farmer can offer as well, since the farmers do not have the huge expense of maintaining their own workforce, so they can offer a little more to reap the canes.
This being a national issue and the results being a national disaster which we have to make up for with our taxes, perhaps the time has come to offer tax free concessions to cane-cutters who cut more than a pre-determined amount per crop. This would encourage them to work on the estates; this is why I am saying that the industry needs men and women in charge who understand the fundamentals of all of this. There has to be a way to encourage people to work in the industry without raising the cost of labour in the industry, ie, a free house lot if you cut more than an established tonnage of cane, and other such attractions. You can’t sit down in some desk at head office and attract workers to the industry without coming up with these kinds of innovative measures. And something has to be done; last year the farmers grew more cane per hectare nationally ‒ 56.30 tonnes ‒ than the estates which only produced 55.18 tonnes of cane per hectare. I have never heard of this happening before. Komal Chand is right, “there are no canes in the fields.” At this stage thinking about massive mechanisation with all of the problems it has and the adverse effect it can have on cane yields is not the answer; it will end up with even less cane in the fields. It has to be done carefully over many years, perhaps even decades, to be successful. The short version is that in order to convert we end up with the sour acid subsoil on top and the fertile topsoil beneath and that depresses yields.
At this time farmers are having a hard time finding labour and many big farmers are going out of the sugar cane business. There are numerous farmers who were given loans by the commercial banks to plant cane at Skeldon consisting of an area which was equal to the existing cultivation of Skeldon before the expansion ‒ ie, in order that the factory could get the required amount of cane it needed to fulfil its huge capacity of 350 tons an hour, farmers were to supply one third of that enormous amount of cane.
It was unworkable nonsense from the beginning, and to repeat, I asked former president Bharrat Jagdeo in his office in 1999, where he got his information from to embrace such a dicey project, since the entire project sounded crazy to me.
The Skeldon farmers now have mostly defaulted on loans from the commercial banks from which they borrowed the money, and it is only through the intervention of the government that they have not been foreclosed on. Did the PPP learn anything from this?
Do they even know why it happened? Of course they did but they don’t care who they hurt. And this is a dangerous practice; the problem is how does GuySuCo keep its employees reaping their canes on time?
Giving out lands to farmers will only aggravate the problem as well as create a bad situation for the farmers themselves who cannot embark on this expensive exercise without bankrupting themselves.
Not satisfied with the disaster they have created at Skeldon for the farmers there, they are now going to get more people to become sugar cane farmers at Uitvlugt by giving them 800 hectares to plant from the estate’s cultivation!
I don’t know where these 800 acres at Uitvlugt are and on what conditions the farmers will have to operate, such as cleaning canals and keeping the drainage systems in good order. However, the lands at Uitvlugt are notoriously bad with the highest rainfall in the industry, and if the estate can’t grow cane on it, which farmer will be able to do so?
This is another disastrous move by the PPP to get people to part with the little money they have and incredibly these people are their own supporters.
Finally, as of this date, I am not aware that the farmers have ever been given their part of the European Union (EU) Development Fund since they, as well as GuySuCo, have lost economically in the removal of the preferential price of sugar. Last year 2012, 10.99 % of the acreage under cane in this country was being cultivated by farmers.
Of the sugar produced from their cane they got 70% of the price per tonne marketed, so if the government was given $24.7 billion for the loss of the subsidy since 2006, then the local sugar cane farmers are entitled to 70% of 11 per cent of the money, ie $189 million.
Editor, since 2006 I have been talking about the allocation to GuySuCo of this relief from the EU to buffer the loss of the preferential prices for our sugar, and the money could have been used to do anything ‒ even diversify GuySuCo.
It was not intended to just make our sugar cane cultivation practices more efficient, and in an unprecedented move recently the EU has now been forced to come out and demand that the money be put where it was supposed to be put ‒ into the sugar industry.
As if this is not embarrassment enough the government still refuses to give the farmers their share of this money which is rightfully theirs; perhaps the EU can now ask that they get their share. When dealing with this PPP government you have to be very specific about what you are giving them grant aid to do, and see that they do it, or they will misuse it.
Finally, yesterday at the APNU press conference I did not disclose the names of the channels which are going to court to challenge the constitutionality of the Broadcast Act, and any publication of the identity of those channels is speculation.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
