Although willing to accept that he should have done more to address problems plaguing the Skeldon sugar factory, former President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday said while critics focus on the plant, the entire industry needs overhauling.
“Maybe I should have intervened a bit more. Sugar is a challenge. Clearly Skeldon has problems and needs to be fixed,” Jagdeo said yesterday at a press conference at Freedom House.
A year before demitting office, after two terms as president, Jagdeo had promised personal intervention should the problem-plagued factory fail to meet production requirements. The Chinese-built factory has underperformed since its commissioning and has also required costly repairs.
Jagdeo said while many critics zoom in on Skeldon plant’s shortcomings, which need to be rectified, the sugar sector in general needs to be revamped. “It is just not the factory. We need new varieties and increased productivity. We need to invest in the other factories and we need to fix Skeldon. Have we managed to fix Skeldon? No… we are prepared to work on it to support it like we did in the bauxite communities. We are prepared to work to fix sugar because sugar is not just about Berbice, [it] is about the economy,” he said.
“What do we do? Do we say let’s get out of sugar? If we get out the entire Berbice region… almost everyone will be affected. So we have to find a way. We don’t have a choice but we have to find a way,” he added.
Jagdeo also noted the punt dump problem at Skeldon and explained that there was not much from a technical point that he could do but that strategies were implemented to fix it. “We had particular issues with the punt dump that was sourced out of Miami. So we had things that need fixings. I did try as president to fix those things. Clearly, we still have to fix some of them because the factory is not running the way it should run but sugar is a complex problem,” he posited.
During an appearance before Parliament’s Economic Services Committee in July last year the company’s Technical Services Manager Yusuf Abdul stated that to fix the ill-performing punt dump could cost US$4 million.
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.
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.
GuySuCo on Friday announced that it will soon make public a revised business plan for 2014-2017 which will address lowering the cost of production and adding value to its product.
In a statement, 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.
