Dear Editor,
Most of what Mr Charles Sohan wrote in your edition yesterday [Feb 24] entitled, ‘Turning around a farm-based corporation operating at a loss is unheard of ,’ is so accurate. I agree 100% with every sentence except with, “Crop diversification for GuySuCo is not a viable proposition because it lacks capital, technical know-how and management skills to convert sugar cultivation to other profitable tropical crops such as bananas, plantains and citrus.” I’ll come back to this.
But let me add to his observation of the failure of the GuySuCo hierarchy to turn around the fortunes of the corporation, or even improve them, over the past decades.
Past directors of GuySuCo have all been specialists in Management, Finance, and Human Resources. It appears that agricultural economists and agronomists had little say in the operations or decision-making. Today, these ex-chairmen and directors continue to believe that any turnaround of the corporation can be done by manipulating human resources and financing, which is partly responsible for the mess in the first place. It seems to me that theirs are all veiled suggestions for political manipulations in decision-making as has been the case with the investment of US$200M in Skeldon, the appointment of Raj Singh as GuySuCo’s Chairman, and many other appointments of people who never saw a canefield. So Mr Sohan is quite right, and Mr Oditt’s suggestions, or what I call, ‘veiled political manipulation’ are bound to fail.
Which brings me to the issue of diversification. I have presented to the government a blueprint for making diversification work.
It rests strongly on the ownership of land, and the discontinuation of political manipulation, something similar to the Bellvue Pilot Project which started in the mid-fifties. Farmers were allotted fifteen acres each and they cultivated and harvested their own canes. For decades, productivity of the land in terms of tons cane/acre and tons sugar/tons canes far exceeded that of GuySuCo. I know. I cut cane at Bellevue in the fifties and sixties. Unfortunately, these ratios fell miserably below GuySuCo’s when absentee landlordism began to take place at Bellvue.
The land must be given to genuine farmers and/or people with genuine agriculture interests and know-how, and this must be done completely without political considerations. Even then, their leases may be conditioned to certain production, productivity and investment ratios, which will greatly discourage the occurrence of absentee landlordism, and reduce the incidence of failure. I can assist with working out the criteria.
As for “lack of capital” being one of the reasons Mr Sohan thinks diversification will not work, I disagree. There are numerous sources of private, public and international funding available, even for private individuals. Besides, the $1.9 billion the government would have otherwise sunk into Wales “lost cause” could be made available to potential farmers as soft loans.
Concerning “technical know-how”, Mr Sohan is not aware of the wealth of services available at the Ministry of Agriculture (I was an economist there at one time, too), the Guyana School of Agriculture, the Guyana National Agriculture Research Extension Institute (NAREI), and the University of Guyana. In any event, technical and marketing services are going to concomitantly improve and increase as we take that one step forward.
Like I have repeated many times before, our comparative advantage lies in agriculture, and specifically, food production. Food production, primary and processed, can rescue GuySuCo and be the country’s engine of growth. We need to take advantage of the US$10 billion food import bill of Caricom. The population is only six million, but over six million people vacation in the Caribbean every year.
Why should they come to the Caribbean to eat pineapples from Hawaii, guavas from Mexico, oranges from California, and sapodillas from India, when Guyana’s fruits are more delicious?
Yours faithfully,
Gokarran Sukhdeo
