Even as the Ministry of Business says it is continuing to create a reformed set of operational regulations for the scrap metal industry, the umbrella association for operators in the sector feels that the treatment that has been meted out to the industry gives rise to the view that it has now come to be regarded as a pariah.
“We have become a soft target. Whatever rules may have been broken in any other industry, gold, for example, there would have between no question of the businesses in that sector being prevented from earning a living for more than a year,” Secretary of the Guyana Scrap Metal Dealers Association (GSMDA) Michael Benjamin told Stabroek Business.
“This demands and emergency intervention by the President. They are demonizing a legitimate industry,” a visibly distressed Benjamin said on Wednesday.
He said he believed the businesses in the trade had been “pushed to the limit.” Benjamin said it has been more than a year since the trade has been closed completely, ostensibly to conduct a forensic audit. Since then, the Ministry of Business which has now assumed responsibility for the sector had, in November last year, agreed to allow 42 containers of scrap metal that had been held at the wharf since the cessation of the trade, to be shipped overseas. Government, this newspaper understands, had agreed to waive the pre-export processing fees involved.
Benjamin explained that at the time the 42 containers were impounded the market price per ton of scrap metal was US$280. However, at the time of release in November the price had slipped to $80 per ton. “When you add storage fees to the reduced value of the scrap some of our local operators lost millions of dollars,” Benjamin said.
The GSMDA Secretary said the real issue was the fact that while the process of regularizing the industry was moving “painfully slowly” more than 1,500 people who are directly involved in the trade “are hurting.” Benjamin said that while he understood the need to regulate the trade this was “a case of putting food on the table, paying mortgages and rents and bringing up children. Whatever has to be done must take those things into account.”
A Business Ministry spokesperson told Stabroek Business that following the decision to shift the administration of the scrap metal trade from the Ministry of Housing to the Ministry of Business work had commenced towards the updating of existing legislation. That, the official told this newspaper, “will take some time,” adding that no timeframe for the completion of the process could be given.
An irate Benjamin told this newspaper that it was “insensitive” not to provide a timeframe “more than a year after the trade was closed.”
It is widely believed that the local scrap metal industry is battling against the infinitely more powerful lobby of the telecommunications, water and electricity sectors, that have targeted rogues who are vandalizing installations in the process of stealing metals, particularly copper. The far-flung nature of these installations make effective policing impossible, a situation that has led to calls for the scrap metal trade to be banned altogether.
Under the previous political administration inspections of consignments of scrap immediately prior to loading for export in order to help detect stolen items had been implemented though it is not known how effective this was. It is also public knowledge that significant volumes of scrap continue to be exported from Guyana illegally, overland for transshipment to Asia.
