Dear Editor,
Why is our sugar industry a huge problem in Guyana? Well, labour is too expensive. Labour is also short. We receive too much rainfall to mechanise effectively and have become uncompetitive with countries which have mechanised.
Our drainage is poor, because we are below sea level, which means that it only drains about 12 hours per day according to the low tides, and to make matters even worse our soils are too clayey to drain freely, and our fields are laid out as cambered beds which are impossible to mechanise without conversion.
Just one inch of rain during the cropping season, can stop all mechanised harvesting operations for as much as two to three days and is the reason why all attempts to mechanise since the 70’s have failed.
Our heavy clay/silt soil on the coast makes the situation worse and soil compaction causes bad growth, and we can no longer afford inter-row work such as forking to loosen our heavy clays to allow aeration of the root zone between crops. This is a major reason for Guyana’s low yield. Other countries not only harvest mechanically, they also do mechanical inter-row tillage after every crop to maintain high yields.
Our high rainfall makes our cane too vegetative and takes 12-15 tons of cane to make a ton of sugar. Brazil and Australia take more like 7-8 TC/TS. We are paying to cut, transport and mill twice the amount of cane as Brazil does to make the same amount of sugar.
Labour in sugar is very expensive and seasonal, with long out of crop periods during rainy seasons of almost half the year, since we, being so close to the equator, have two rainy seasons per year. Almost all other countries only have one, the estates by union agreement have to find alternative work for the employees for almost half the year when the cane is not being harvested, mid-April to mid-July and mid-November to mid-February making a bad situation worse.
To add to the problem, the sugar we manufacture is sucrose, it is a compound sugar made up of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. So 50% of our sugar is fructose, there is a growing lobby worldwide to remove all fructose from the diet of humans, since it is now suspected that there is no metabolic pathway for the use of fructose by the human body to produce energy, and it is just absorbed into the liver and stored as fat. Sugar, they argue, “poses far greater dangers than cavities and love handles; it is a toxin that harms our organs and disrupts the body’s usual hormonal cycles. Regardless of where the Sucrose sugar we eat comes from, our cells are interested in dealing with Fructose and Glucose, not the bulkier Sucrose” so the moment the sucrose enters the human body it is immediately broken down to fructose and glucose. To add to the problem fructose is now linked to colon cancer.
Before some YouTube expert decides that I am suggesting that we should do away with our sugar industry completely, it is not my thinking at this time. Because we take such a large amount of cane to produce a ton of sugar 12-14 tons compared to 7-8 in Australia and Brazil, we should not be planning to build a white sugar plant, we should be seeking to convert all of our sugarcane biomass into ethanol for manufacturing alcohol and fueling motor vehicles which use gasoline. Since the sugar cane biomass always produces about 19 or 20 gallons of ethanol from one ton of cane when fermented and in view of the difficulties I have outlined above we should be phasing sugar out as we are phasing in something more suited to our climate and geological location.
Taking the sugar cane fields at Wales to plant coconuts is just nuts. And we keep forgetting the facts which our history should have taught us. In 2004 Guyana produced 325,000 tonnes of sugar. In 2007 Robert Persaud cancelled the Management Contract with Booker Tate because he thought that it was too expensive and that he could run the corporation, the rest is history. Political affiliation has driven appointments in our sugar industry for too long, and the very acute shortage of management skills in the industry today is the result. But as usual we are blaming the GuySuCo management, but it was we, the real owners of the corporation who have allowed politicians to appoint people who were totally unequal to the task of managing our industry. Now it is very simple to blame these same underperforming managers and not ourselves for sitting quietly and allowing it in the first place, it is we, the people, who own these estates who are allowing people who are totally incompetent, to interfere with the management of the industry which has led it to the sad state it is in today and are outraged when the inevitable happens. Just as we are allowing the Government Ministers who are untrained as managers to make fundamental management decisions which are ruining our country. Even our oil potential as huge as it is, in the wrong hands can lead to disaster, just look at Venezuela, and then look at how badly we have done with Exxon so far.
A good definition of insanity of doing the same nonsense over and over again expecting a different result. We have to open our eyes and see the truth.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
