The Guyana Sugar Cor-poration’s (GuySuCo) Rose Hall and Blairmont estates this week began harvesting their second sugarcane crop for the year and by August 5 if the weather holds up, all estates would have started, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Rajendra Singh says.
Appearing before Parliament’s Economic Services Committee yesterday, Singh said that Skeldon will be the last estate to start grinding. He did not say why Skeldon would commence after the six other estates.
GuySuCo officials also appeared before the committee last Friday and it was revealed that problems still persist at the Skeldon factory especially with the punt dumps.
The company’s Technical Services Manager Yusuf Abdul had noted that to fix the ill performing punt dump could cost US$4 million.
This figure was changed over the course of the meeting.
There has been significant controversy surrounding this figure as the rehabilitation of the punt dump was one of six projects that was supposed to be done by the South African firm Bosch Engineering. Stabroek News had been reliably informed that the cost of the Bosch rehabilitation would be approximately US$30 million. However, in March, GuySuCo refuted this figure and said the repairs cost US$1.8 million.
With the revelation by Yusuf that the rehabilitation of the punt dump could be millions more, GuySuCo’s original quote of US$1.8 million would be inaccurate unless this is an additional sum that is required to facilitate further rehabilitation of the factory.
When Stabroek News had visited the Skeldon Factory in August last year, the need to do additional work to the punt dump system to change it from a hydraulic based system to a winch system, was being mulled.
Factory workers and management were clear that a new system is needed if the factory is to ever realize the 350-tonnes cane per hour grinding.
Meantime, the 2014 sugar production was revised by Singh. He stated that instead of 216,000 tonnes GuySuCo is aiming for an annual production of 219,000 tonnes. The 2013-2017 Strategic Plan originally envisaged production of 278,752 tonnes.
The corporation was able to surpass its first crop target of 74,616 tonnes making just under 80,000 tonnes for the year.
There was a push to meet Skeldon’s first crop target of 13,795 tonnes so much so that for the last two weeks of grinding, the Skeldon factory was kept open to at times, grinding less than seven tonnes of sugar daily just to achieve the target.
