The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) is grinding its first set of cane sourced from private cane farmers through a land release programme at the Uitvlugt Estate.
Chief Executive Officer Raj Singh told Stabroek News that five farmers were each given 200 hectares for cultivation and the corporation is in talks with two additional farmers to utilise 500 hectares that were recently advertised for cultivation.
He said that calling upon private cane farmers was a way to mitigate the low worker turnout at the West Demerara estate. He also stated that the estate was prepared for enhanced mechanisation and as a result all private cane farmers would need to ensure that they had plans to mechanise the fields. The cost of field conversion would fall on the farmers and not GuySuCo, he added.
Singh called the initiative a trial and stated that since this was the first harvest that would be utilising the cane grown by private farmers, the company would need to assess whether the initiative was beneficial before more land was released out of the 6,000 under GuySuCo’s cultivation.
Singh said the corporation was hopeful and had a positive outlook although he was aware of some of the challenges at the Skeldon Estate, which has also been a focus of the push to increase private cane production. The Upper Corentyne Chamber of Commerce and Industry (UCCCI) has expressed concern about the profitability of the venture for farmers in light of the Skeldon factory’s shortcomings.
President of the UCCCI Abraham Subnauth had told Stabroek News that the challenges have drastically affected the farmers’ ability to produce and turn a profit. He said that payment plans for cane were done on the amount of sugar produced and not on the tonnage of cane delivered to the factory. However, while the factory was supposed to be using an average of eight to 10 tonnes of cane to produce a tonne of sugar, instead the average rests at 20 to 25 tonnes of cane to make a tonne of sugar, Subnauth stated.
The UCCCI held a meeting with private farmers in July, at which point farmers said their liabilities to banks were becoming enormous and kept increasing from crop to crop. As a result, the UCCCI publicly stated that “farmers made it clear at the meeting that unless immediate relief or solution is offered, they will have no alternative but to abandon their farms.”
Meanwhile, the land at Uitvlugt, which was initially advertised in July of 2013, had been out of cultivation for over two years. Komal Chand, who heads the Guyana Agriculture and General Workers’ Union (GAWU), had expressed some reservations about private cane farmers being given land out of cultivation for such an extended period of time. He had told Stabroek New at the time of the first advertisement that poor cane quality can be a leading contributor to not meeting annual targets and GuySuCo needed to take a long hard look at addressing the agronomy needs of the land.
Uitvlugt has an annual sugar production target of 13,618 tonnes, according to documentation produced by Singh during a meeting with the Economic Services Committee of the National Assembly in July. For the second crop, the estate is set to produce 7,587 tonnes, just over five percent of the industry’s second crop target.
