This newspaper’s interview last Tuesday with Mr Errol Hanoman, who is serving his second stint as CEO of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), dealt with, among other things, the many seemingly intractable problems confronting the local sugar industry and the challenge of extricating ourselves from those problems.
Part of the difficulty with public discourse on sugar is the tendency, mostly by letter writers, to talk around the challenges that it faces; to debate the pros and cons of keeping one or another estate open; and other (admittedly important) issues to do with production, prices and markets. This is without dealing head on as bluntly and pointedly as we ought to, with what one might call the ‘bottom line’ as far as the industry is concerned.
Sugar is not the only issue that is caught fast in a bind of political circumstance. The real problem is that we have tended, over the years, to heap all sorts of diversionary issues on the real one, thereby diluting the national discourse on the industry and causing the debate on turning the industry around to be denied a sense of direction.
Both political commentators and sugar executives have tended, deliberately, it often seems, to lose themselves in the diversionary issues, stubbornly refusing to concede that acknowledging and confronting the political circumstance in which sugar finds itself is central to successfully addressing the industry’s crisis. Put simply, it is a question of setting aside the dilemma of constituency politics and moving towards a collective solution that is good for the industry and the nation as a whole. As it happens, submerging narrow political interests beneath the virtue of national good is not a virtue with which our nation is blessed. Maybe we will find that virtue in times to come.
That is why we found our recent extended encounter with Mr Hanoman so interesting. Chief Executive Officers of state-run entities in Guyana have a knack (one might argue that it is a matter of survival) of picking up the line of the ball quickly and putting their innings together on that basis. That is to say, they say what fits the political circumstance, easily dispensing with truth and realism in the process. We found Mr Hanoman to be different. If most senior sugar executives are acutely aware of the fact that the sugar industry is performing “very badly” Mr Hanoman actually says it. More than that, he left us in no doubt that his primary preoccupation is not so much with getting sugar production up, since, he contends, increased production will not enhance the fortunes of the sector, but with getting the requisite political green light to re-direct sugar away from its current counterproductive direction in which the vast majority of what is earned goes down the bottomless pit of a labour-intensive industry.
As if to underscore the futility of sugar’s current direction, Mr Hanoman referred to an exercise undertaken last year in which it theoretically allocated the company all of the financial resources that it needs up until 2025, in which circumstances sugar production would find its way just above 300,000 tonnes. But even if that level of production were to be realized, he argues, the annual losses that would still amount to billions of dollars, in which circumstance the industry was probably likely to ‘crash and burn’ (figuratively speaking, of course) long before 2025.
The point to be made here, of course, is that sugar is being kept alive ‒ in its present form, that is ‒ by purely political imperatives rather than by economic realism. All too often the industrial relations climate in the sector is so overwhelmingly toxic that it becomes the industry’s biggest enemy. Here is a staggering statistic provided by the GuySuCo CEO. Between 2000 and September this year strikes in the sugar industry amounted to one million man hours. Even someone with a fleeting understanding of the extent of GuySuCo’s dependence on its labour force can be under no illusions about the significance of that statistic to the economic health of the industry. It is perhaps worth mentioning too that in the CEO’s view, the majority of the work stoppages that have occurred this year were unjustified.
We do not believe for a moment that Mr Hanoman’s candoir on the crisis at GuySuCo and what it would take to turn the industry around has anything to do with his amusing story of alternative job security available on account of his wife’s current search for a competent gardener to tend her home gardening pursuits. Rather, we think that he is acutely aware that a point has long been reached where good sense demands that we bite the bullet, set the politics aside and apply a greater dosage of realism to tackling the problems of the industry. After all, Mr Hanoman makes clear, there is something decidedly absurd about government pouring a multi-billion dollar subsidy (which can be directed into so many other needy areas) into keeping GuySuCo afloat in circumstances where remaining afloat is no more than a pointless holding position.
