The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GuySuCo Sasenarine Singh yesterday announced that on Monday, the Government of Guyana released $3 billion to the sugar corporation and is adamant that the entity can be turned around.
During a visit to the Blairmont estate, the CEO informed that $2.2 billion will be used to reopen the three estates, while the remainder will go towards “recapitalizing the current estates.”
According to Singh, GuySuCo is presently in the process of building a business turnaround plan, and as such, they have recently selected two consultants to work in the office of the CEO to ensure that GuySuCo has a five- year turnaround plan “which will give us different options on what is the most efficient way to do sugar going forward.”
“Do we need a cogeneration plant, do we need a refinery, do we need a distillery, do we need an ethanol plant, do we need combinations of these, what is the right model we need to get to make this work?” These were all questions, Singh stated, that must be addressed.
Additionally, he noted that over the last three weeks they have worked to change the thinking of GuySuCo, “The whole vision of GuySuCo right now is to move up the value chain as fast as we can within the constraints of finance.”
He then pointed out that not only is GuySuCo working to move up but it will also be expanding with the reopening of the three estates, as such in eventuality, close to 15,000 workers and their families will depend directly on the corporation.
The CEO explained that presently, GuySuCo produces three main products; packaged sugar, bagged sugar, and bulk sugar. He disclosed that the corporation makes a profit from packaged sugar and a loss from bulk sugar, “The vision is to move GuySuCo away from bulk sugar to value-added products.”
In that regard, he added, “Blairmont is going to be focusing exclusively now on the export market for packaged sugar, while Enmore will be focusing on the local market, for obvious reasons [as] Enmore is closer to Georgetown and Region Four where the bulk of our population [lives].”
He recalled that at the recent testing of the Enmore Packaging Plant, he saw a team led by Chief Engineer, Vijay Goberd-han, who were faced with “idle and dead machines” but worked overtime for the last two weeks “to get the ball rolling.”
The CEO asserted, “GuySuCo is real, GuySuCo is not in a mood right now to be a loser, we are going to win this battle. And how do we win this battle? By selling sugar at the right price level and the right products.”
Singh also emphasised that work is currently underway to develop a short term, medium term, and long term plan.
He declared that the plan is to make procurement more efficient while focusing on the factories, fields, cane transportation routes and to “ensure that the elements that would bring greater value to Guysuco are resourced.”
In the medium term, the aim is to establish public-private partnerships “to help us to build the value-added elements around sugar,” reminding that raw bulk sugar is a challenge.
“Where the money is sugar-related products at the top end, so we talking about refined sugar, ethanol and rum manufacturing, alcohol manufacturing, [and] agro-energy. This is the level where we want to be at so that we can make this a going concern and a viable element to the continued contribution of human development in Guyana.”
To the naysayers that have been saying that “GuySuCo is a loss maker,” Singh said it is absolutely inaccurate, since “economically, GuySuCo has been one of the greatest contributors to the human development of the people of Guyana.”
The CEO however, acknowledged that GuySuCo will need the support of the people of Guyana so that they can recapitalise and reenergise and “take back that role.”
“The reality is – GuySuCo is back and it’s going places with the help of the people of Guyana,” he asserted.
Meanwhile, over the upcoming weekend, the Minister of Agriculture Zulfikar Mustapha and representatives of the Indian High Commission are expected to visit all the estates in Berbice. “We are looking to get private participants at the value-added level into the sugar industry so that we can bolt on maybe a refinery, we don’t know the location, it is either Albion or Skeldon, so that we can tap into the Caribbean market which imports 200,000 tons of white sugar from out[side] of the Caribbean at escalated prices, when we can do it by using [the] Caribbean external tariff route and be able to be competitive and still make a profit in that market space.”
Singh during his visit to the Blairmont Packaging Plant yesterday, also pointed out that after the closure of the estates, GuySuCo handed over to NICIL, “several moving tractors, moving implements, moving elements for cane production and what we got back was several bits and pieces of scrap iron.”
Singh dubbed the closure of the sugar estates and damaging of machinery and infrastructure, “a national crime” and added that if possible, those responsible should be incarcerated.
He then declared, “We are going to rebuild the sugar industry, brick by brick, and prove to those people who want to destroy it that it can come back.”
