Dear Editor.
I see another sugar expert has surfaced in the letter from Rajendra Parmanand in the Stabroek News of January 29 captioned ‘Sugar industry does not need handed down boardroom decisions.’
I can’t tell where all these experts were when the PPP were in power and destroying the sugar industry. And again I must ask who Mr Parmanand is since I am unable to identify him; perhaps he would be kind enough to reveal himself as Mr Tulsie did, since it is always best to know who I am answering.
So now I am forced yet again to address the misinformation contained in the flawed letter by Mr Parmanand.
- He says that I am proposing “other crops.” I have never proposed “other crops” for GuySuCo, never! Nowhere in my letter do I say that I am proposing diversification.
- He writes that if we don’t get the “other crops” right this time, that it will be the end of the industry. Anyone who does not understand that the industry as we know it is already destroyed by the PPP should wake up. It is finished as a commercial operation, and nothing we do can bring it back now; we have to think of alternatives to run alongside the growing of sugar cane to soften the blow to the taxpayers of this country of having to pay billions of dollars a year in subsidies to keep it alive.
- In the industry we always had a saying that when the tail begins wagging the dog it is time to run. If as Mr Parmanand says that the sugar workers today do not allow themselves to be reasonable and to see that what went on was wrong and unsustainable, there will be no end to this disaster. So if he is telling me that the workers are now in charge without the leadership of their unions, the politicians or the estate management, and that they just want more no matter what the consequences, then it is no wonder that we are where we are today. But I do not believe it. The PPP used the sugar workers to buy votes during 1992 to 2015 period. They made ridiculous decisions such as the Skeldon project, wasting so much money there that no money was left to keep the rest of the industry functioning properly, and today they are using the workers to vilify the coalition government and disrupt production.
- The workers of Wales like the workers of Diamond and the workers of LBI displaced under the PPP will have to understand that there comes a time when hard decisions have to be made, but that in our case we may be able to offer relief by October since we have additional plans in the pipeline which we will disclose later. To say that we have no plans in place for the relief of the Wales workers on the closure of the factory, is untrue. The alternative being offered to the Wales workers is that most of them will be absorbed by Uitvlugt estate which has a labour shortage, and that notwithstanding the longer distance the workers have to travel they will be catered for and offered transportation to work there. The addition to the mix of the diversification possibility we have in mind was not what prompted this decision to close Wales; it is Wales losing $1.9 billion of the $16 billion the industry will lose this year which prompted that decision. If we did not close it we would have had to close both Uitvlugt and Wales shortly. One of them had to close and the board made the decision to close Wales since the PPP has left both factory and field in much poorer shape than Uitvlugt. With the combined workforce of the two estates working at Uitvlugt there may be a chance of producing more sugar and lowering its losses.
- He says that my perceptions of the huge increases given to the sugar workers were not legitimate; that the public servants had a 300% wage increase between 1992 to 2000. I am not going to try to verify this increase to the public servants and the reasons why it was adjusted as a result of Hoyte’s Economic Recovery Programme, I do however question it, but if 24,000 people were earning $4.6 billion in 1992 and by 2000 18,000 workers were earning $12.6 billion it means that in 1992 the average earnings per worker in the industry were $192,000 each per annum, and that by 2000 this had increased to $700,000 average per annum; the increase was 364%. But this was more or less a mistake, since their wages had already been adjusted for the ERP so they got 2 adjustments when the public servants only got one.
- It was Booker Tate which was employed by Hoyte and which made those increases in production after 1989 and not the PPP.
- I do not own a sugar estate, my family does. I stopped working directly in sugar since 1992 when I began to develop my TV network; I never worked at Houston and had no material effect or say on any aspect of the management of that estate. Mr Parmanand can extrapolate all sorts of reasons why Houston failed, but it had nothing to do with me.
- I have no further comment to make on Houston; I suggest that Mr Parmanand finds out who it was that was in charge of it then, and question them. I took no part in and had no say in anything to do with the management of Houston. These attacks on me are a kind of compliment, since the attacks are orchestrated to discredit what I say and there is only one reason why this is happening: what I am saying is hurting someone.
Editor, I don’t know what ‘handed down boardroom decisions’ means. Is this writer suggesting that we run an industry without a board? But in many ways he may be right, since the PPP’s board was a complete disaster made up of total misfits, as were its ministers of agriculture at the time. When the European Union’s developmental funds were flowing from 2006 onwards, none of it went to the industry where it should have been sent to buffer the loss of the preferential price. We can only speculate what would have been the consequences if the money was given to the industry to restructure itself from 2006 to 2013-14 to offset the loss of the EU’s preferential price and not wasted on the PPP government’s shenanigans.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
