Dear Editor,
Please permit me a partial response to your editorial of Dec 20 on the future of the sugar industry. For the last century and more, industrial development worldwide has been based on labour-saving. With even a faint notion of the public good, this means providing alternative employment for workers displaced from enterprises proven uncompetitive. There are so many new profitable opportunities for Guyana’s natural and human resources that to maintain an antiquated industry must reflect callous exploitation on the part of those who thereby get to make national policy between one election and the next.
After all these years, our government still fails to encourage private capital and management to develop businesses that could pay more than cane-cutters’ wages. Now the inevitable and foreseeable future is catching up with sugar, but the decision-makers are not paying attention beyond their own short-term benefits.
Sugar workers, and the rest of us (including you, Editor), seem powerless to overcome political delusions with mere common sense. We allow even inexpert publicity machines to divert us from the stark realities that lie so close below the surface of governance in Guyana. And this applies not only to the sugar industry.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
