The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) will shortly make public a revised business plan for 2014-2017 which will address lowering the cost of producing and adding value to its product.
This disclosure was made by GuySuCo in a press release yesterday in response to the March 25th report in Stabroek News (SN) and another in Kaieteur News (KN).
GuySuCo said its “management is fully aware and acknowledges that, with the prevailing world price for raw sugar, in order to be competitive the industry must change going forward. The revised Business Plan for 2014-2017, which will shortly be made public, addresses the means of reducing the cost of production, increasing harvesting efficiency and embracing value added production. This will take time and dedicated application throughout the industry.”
In terms of projected production and other benchmarks, GuySuCo has fallen behind the 2014-2017 business plan which had been intended to address the failure to meet an earlier blueprint.
GuySuCo criticised the reports in SN and KN on the company’s production figure for the first crop and other matters, saying that they were “substantially misinformed”.
The release said that for the first crop, to the end of last week, GuySuCo produced 32,684 tonnes of sugar. This, it said, was 2,210 tonnes in excess of the company’s projected production of 30,474 tonnes. The figure reported by Stabroek News was 35,400 tonnes. In a comment, Stabroek News Editor-in-Chief Anand Persaud said he hoped that yesterday’s release from GuySuCo signals a new willingness to provide production figures. He said that in recent years GuySuCo has declined to provide regular information on sugar production as if it were a state secret. He added that it was the newspaper’s obligation to find information from other sources in the face of the corporation’s unwillingness to provide official data.
The GuySuCo release also said that the industry has increased its yield by 4.1 Tonnes of Cane per Hectare (TCH) while, at the same time, maintaining its projected Tonnes of Cane per Tonnes of Sugar (TCTS) at 11.9 tonnes. It further said that the Tonnes of Sugar per Hectare (TSH), has risen from the projected figure of 4.44 TSH to 5.06 and said that this was a significant improvement in efficiency in contrast to the published figures in KN.
GuySuCo said that this year, the industry is producing 59.5 Tonnes of Cane per Hectare and with reasonable weather conditions and a continued labour turnout over the next six weeks, the industry should comfortably meet its first crop budget target of 86,201 tonnes of sugar, an 8% increase over the 2014 first crop. Yesterday’s press release was also the first time that the corporation had disclosed to the public the production figure for the first crop.
With regard to production at Skeldon Estate, on which it said the media reports prefer to focus, the release said that Skeldon Estate, in 2014, produced a total of 590,018 tonnes of cane at 56.23 TCH, the highest production since the new factory commenced operation.
The release said that the industry can confidently expect that Skeldon Estate will produce 657,372 tonnes of cane at 59.62 TCH, this year, which will translate into an 11% increase in cane production and a 6% hike in productivity.
GuySuCo also denied reports that young canes at Skeldon were cut over the last two years and that there are insufficient canes for the 2015 crop. It said that the reverse was true.
“The facts are that Skeldon Estate, over the last 4 years, has been unable to utilise its actual cane production per crop, with a resultant carryover of canes left in the field each crop. However, in 2014, the best year of harvesting the second crop, the majority of the canes in the field were utilised. Only 343 hectares of cane from 2014 remains to be harvested in 2015 and will be harvested in this coming crop”, GuySuCo said.
While the media has reported on Skeldon’s estate, more coverage has been focused on the troubled Chinese-built Skeldon factory which has had to have costly repairs done to it.
GuySuCo’s release yesterday said that the required modifications of the outboard punt dump to a winch system similarly in use in a number of other Estates and other maintenance in the factory has been completed. It said that this has increased capacity. It added that grinding for the first crop commenced on 15th March after the completion of steam and equipment trials on the previous day and minor equipment repairs effected.
It added that the Estate is ready to deliver an average grinding rate of 250 tonnes per hour, over a seven-week grinding period, for 233,685 tonnes of cane. It added that the Estate is expected to conclude the first crop in the first week in May, before the midyear rains. The press release gave no projection for the amount of sugar that the Skeldon estate is expected to produce for the first crop only the amount of sugar it is supposed to grind. Further, its grinding rate of 250 tonnes of cane per hour is far below what it was projected to grind when the former Jagdeo administration unveiled the sugar modernisation project in 2006. The estate was supposed to grind at 350 tonnes per hour and have an annual production of 110,000 tonnes of sugar. It has fallen far below these two figures. A South African firm which did remedial work at the Skeldon factory projected that the maximum grinding rate would be only 250 tonnes.
