Dear Editor,
I seem to have obtained a pen pal in the person of Rajendra Parmanand, again I have to say that he is presuming facts which are not in evidence in his letter ‘The industry still needs all hands on deck’ in the Stabroek News of February 6. I never said that the Minister of Agriculture (MOA) did not OK the closure of Wales; in fact the CEO of GuySuCo reported to his board that he had already met with and sought permission from the MOA about the closure, and he obtained agreement to do so, before he brought it to the board to be ratified, which was required under our laws.
GuySuCo is a state-owned corporation and the responsible Minister is at the MOA, so his permission to make such a far-reaching decision had to be obtained before the board could have announced the closure. Does Mr Parmanand think that we are madmen to make such an important decision which has such far-reaching financial, social and political repercussions without it being discussed at the cabinet level?
He claims in his letter that he is not a sugar expert, but nevertheless continues to write and offer expert opinions on a number of issues specific to GuySuCo. He questions my statement that our vision for Wales cannot be of importance to the industry; this is not so. What we have in mind has great import not only for this industry but Guyana as a whole. My statement is very clear: I am not on this board to see if it is possible to grow sugar cane under our conditions profitably, just as I will not waste my time trying to find out why Houston’s workforce died on them. It is the inevitability of the situation which seems to escape the writer, that the workforce of GuySuCo and therefore sugar is dying on us, diminishing every day, and if Wales were to grow more cane tomorrow, the current workforce would not be able to reap it, fertilize it or perform the other essential agronomic operations necessary to make it flourish. On the other hand, these workers, working alongside their comrades at Uitvlugt will be able to obtain work and make Uitvlugt which is also experiencing a labour shortage, more efficient and soften the economic blow to the industry which has announced that this year it will realise a $16 billion loss. This is not a rich country; $16 billion is very close to 7% of this nation’s total budget for 2016.
It is irrational to keep estates open when there is no possibility of mechanizing the industry, due to the high rainfall; the soggy nature of our soils; and the cambered beds which are so difficult to convert to a mechanically friendly layout. In fact these same cambered beds had two benefits for us which we will lose when we change them over to flat land for mechanical harvesting, something which has escaped everyone: 1. These beds raised the level of the land allowing more root zone for the canes to flourish; and 2. they established within the fields a storage capacity to hold the runoff rainfall water until the kokers were opened. The exposure of toxic subsoils is another very important factor in trying to convert these beds to flat lands for mechanical harvesting. I repeat, it is a daunting task which we have grappled with since the ʼ70s and has offered no promise of success.
The difference between myself and Mr Parmanand is that I have a vision and I see that the sugar industry is not profitable and will never be, given our conditions and the
mismanagement which went before. And under the current crushing debt the Guyana Sugar Corporation faces, it can never recover without a massive infusion of funds which this country does not have. And as sad as it is, and it is sad, since I myself cried over it many times ‒ and I mean tears ‒ when I saw Versailles die little by little after GuySuCo closed that factory in 1978, and every morning when I left the manager’s house to cross the road, I had to face 250 angry cane-cutters armed with cutlasses assembled in front of the Versailles office demanding punts which had not arrived from Uitvlugt.
I never questioned GuySuCo’s right to close the factory since it would have been a waste of time; these people had genuine economic reasons why it was not profitable to keep the factory operating, but I questioned the alternative they offered us, which was the waterway to Uitvlugt which had serious limitations and never worked properly. So don’t lecture me about the social impact of these closings, and we are not unique; Trinidad has virtually closed their sugar industry and they have oil money to back them up. Barbados did the same. In Guyana we closed Diamond and LBI as a result of our own mismanagement. My question in this current situation is the utter stupidity of expanding the Guyana sugar industry with money we did not have in the face of the European Union’s announcement that they would no longer be subsidizing our sugar by over 30%, and this at a time when the 14 ACP sugar producing countries affected were downsizing and even closing down their sugar industries. Instead we expanded ours by building Skeldon, aka the Guyana Titanic. It was a monumental act of stupidity and it is what has brought us to this sorry state today. You have to blame who has to be blamed, and Mr Parmanand has not in fact done that.
I also have not had to date a response to my question, as to why the farmers and the Guyana Sugar Corporation never received any of the EU’s development funds which were specifically given to offset the loss of the EU subsidy since 2006, when the industry could have tried to retool to become more efficient or to invest in diversification. The problem with downward spirals is that they get worse as time goes on and the debt rises. We not only entered this downward spiral but it is getting worse since we are taking with us the losses of the Skeldon disaster.
Incredibly Mr Parmanand says that “for many years it has been a known ‘fact’ that neither trade unions, politicians or management have command and control over sugar workers, they act independently and believe that they are indispensable.” If there is any truth to this, why are they crying now? I cannot pretend to understand why cabinet made this decision, but perhaps they believe that it is unfair for the sugar workers who believed that they are so independent and indispensable to now wish that the rest of the workers of Guyana must pay through their taxes, to keep an uneconomical industry alive so that they can continue to operate totally irresponsibly and independently. Does this make any sense? Remember that this is what Mr Parmanand is saying.
Editor, I do not see that continuing this discourse is getting us anywhere, since Mr Parmanand is unprepared to place the blame where it belongs, and since his understanding of the mechanization process is so flawed and his perception is that the sugar workers are a law unto themselves but still want to know why they are in this situation now.
I especially don’t see how striking against the industry now can get anything for them; the thinking seems to be the sugar industry is a financial disaster now, so let’s strike and shut down the entire industry. This can’t be logical. The workers of Wales have gained a lot of attention and friends who are helping them to ventilate their problem, I myself attended the symposium at Moray House on Friday evening to gain firsthand knowledge of what their perception of the situation is, but the workers can undo all of the goodwill they have generated by striking now.
Showing that Mr Parmanand is probably right they are either completely out of control, or someone with a political agenda is leading them out of control. It is where he and I don’t see eye to eye on this matter; at all times since nationalization, the sugar workers have been under political control. Since if they paused to think for a moment, and they were as independent as Mr Parmanand says that they are, they would see that striking could not possibly be in the interest of the Wales workers or the industry.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
