Dear Editor,
My first letter to Stabroek News was some time in late 1989, when as a 16-year old Sixth Former, I chose to highlight the lack of funding and deplorable condition of my old school. Following the letter’s publication, the school’s headmaster was asked to corroborate my claims, which he did. At the same time a senior functionary had sought to lay the blame on the school’s administration. In the aftermath, the headmaster was quietly sent packing, for “talking back”!
However, as Bob Marley sang, “When one door is closed, many more are opened.” The former headmaster was to later accomplish much as an administrator of youth cricket, and as the principal of one the country’s most successful private schools.
I reflected on the foregoing as I contemplated my response to Mr Anthony Vieira’s scathing letter in the Stabroek News of January 20, in which, among other things, he surmised that Khemraj Tulsie does not exist as a real person, but as a ghost writer of articles on the local sugar industry.
You see, sadly I do not know that the Guyana of 1989 and the one which we have today, are any different. In addition, both my wife and I work for GuySuCo, a state-owned company of which Mr Vieira has finally become a director. Hence, my apprehensions about penning this response.
A short while back I had written that the sugar industry is in dire straits, and that its uncertain future seems to matter only to those who have vested interests. This statement was in response to the calls of many in the public for GuySuCo to be closed. I, like many others, thereafter sought to make suggestions about how the industry can possibly be restructured and given an extension on its life.
Those suggestions were informed by my own experiences as an agricultural technician, and as a member of the supervisory and managerial staff, not only in GuySuCo but also in the wider agriculture sector. Having said this, I must admit that my understanding of the sugar industry has been limited to my experiences as an employee of GuySuCo, and supported by the technical and academic training I have been exposed to over a fair period of time. In this regard, I must also admit that I lack the voluminous insight Mr Vieira has had as this country’s largest private cane farmer and land baron, and certainly his years as a very successful sugar producer would exceed my age by far!
My wife and I have together contributed in excess of 40 years of service to the sugar industry, and almost 50 years to the agriculture sector in general, having joined GuySuCo while still in our teens. Like many young families that grew up in sugar, we can credit the industry for giving us just about everything we have, including the opportunity of putting two children into university. For instance, we both have to be eternally grateful to sugar for affording us post-secondary education. Hence, my personal adamancy that the sugar industry means more to this country than just its existence as an economic enterprise.
My family’s own relationship with sugar, as outlined above, is synonymous with the kind of attachment thousands of other families have with GuySuCo across this country. Sugar is just too big to be allowed to fail – too many households in this country will fail with it if we continue to listen to the chants of “Close it down”.
And this brings me to the point of why I consider a phased restructuring of the industry is better than some of the choices others are proffering, such as closure, full privatization or maintaining the happy-go-lucky status quo. I would be among the first to admit that many opportunities for restructuring in the past were either missed or deliberately overlooked in favour of the very sentiments about the welfare of the industry’s workers, as I have laid out before.
GuySuCo is a state-owned company. That has exposed it often in the past to two different sets of forces – (1) technical and strategic management from within, and (2) political direction from without. I do not have to spell out which one triumphs more often. For me, one of the saddest sights I recall was when sometime around 1995 the entire fleet of cane-harvesting machines were washed and parked north of the LBI administrative office, in preparation for shipping overseas. Twenty years’ worth of efforts at early mechanization, which would have paid great dividends today, were swept up and sold off, at the behest of – guess who? What about the sugar levy? Summing it up and adjusting for inflation may make it bigger than GuySuCo’s debt today.
And so to Mr Vieira also, I say yes, I understand the sugar industry and know what has gone before. And we can continue to blame whoever we want to, for the current state of the industry, but decisive and purposive action belongs to him and the others who are in charge now. Making that difference in the lives of the thousands of poor families who depend upon sugar, now rests on his and their shoulders. We listened attentively while he was on the outside; now he is in the driver’s seat.
With regard to my conceptual ideas of the role of small-scale commercial farmers in sugar, I have seen what has worked and what has not. As he admitted, some are making profits; the others at the other end would have done similarly if Skeldon had lived up to expectations. All I suggested was to empower those who can do better, to continue to grow. My developmental work with more than a thousand farming families over an 8-year period, says that the small farmer can rise to the challenge if supported.
On the issue of closure, I would humbly ask that Mr Vieira explain what has become of the lives of his hundreds of former workers, and to what productive use he has put the lands of the former Houston Estate since its closure. The challenges, if there were any, will inform us about what to expect if we happen to go down that path.
Yours faithfully,
Khemraj Tulsie
