Dear Editor,
Guyana faces many challenges in sugar but the most important one is the weather. The second most important one is shortage of labour. At one time the corporation employed more than 25,000 persons; today it is around 7000. I won’t start too far back, so I will start in 2010. In 2010, the industry produced 220,818 tonnes of sugar and employed 17,000 persons. I discovered that between 2019 and the previous 20 years [2001-2019] a total of 31,004 MMs of rain fell, which is an average of 1554 MMs per annum; in the previous 20 years [1978 to 1998] a total of 32,523 MMs of rain fell, an average of 1626 MMs per annum, incredibly in the period 1969 to 1976 the average annual precipitation was 2116.5 MMs. Therefore, the annual precipitation seems to be reducing rather than increasing [GuySuCo’s records].
When we had enough manual labour we could have a very long cropping period of over 200 days per year, and to give one example, we used to burn sometimes three grinding days of cane when the rain was limiting our ability to burn, since the limiting factor to production was mainly no cane burnt, because even while the rain was falling, the workers could cut and load the cane manually. Today, the sad fact is our workforce has been dwindling as no one wants to do that onerous task of cutting cane anymore, and we have been struggling to produce even when we are claiming that we are capable of mechanizing the industry. HOWEVER, machines can’t work more than say 75-100 days per year in Guyana, our weather will not allow it, and this has affected the industry badly.
There is a standard practice in the industry to replant 20 per cent of the cultivation every year so that we won’t carry old ratoons. So we expected that our cultivations will comprise plant canes and 4 ratoons. We rarely achieve our planting programs because of rainfall limiting our land preparation opportunity days to 75 days per year. So here is an industry, which can’t plough or till its land with machines more than 75 days per year, but is planning to have mechanical harvesting for 220 days per year. Even though there is some leeway, the fact is that putting these heavy machines in the fields to harvest and the necessary trailers to collect the cane and take it to the punts, causes so much compaction, that after harvesting, one MUST do inter-row TILLAGE to undo the compaction which result from those operations. BUT, and I calculated it myself, if we set about to do a 100 day per year harvesting crop by machines with the hectarage we currently have, those factories don’t have the capacity to take that amount of cane to make sugar in only 100 days.
The thinking behind all of this is very sound and cannot be solved by those who are currently in charge, I will not apologize for writing that they are not. But I do want to be constructive, because I do support President Ali’s hopes of salvaging the industry, and I never said that we must close down the entire sugar industry. I said that we should stop producing sugar and take the cane and make ethanol. But the PPP’s intransigence not to close the sugar industry is today paying quite large dividends, since in the Caribbean, there are only two sugar exporting countries left – Guyana and Belize. Because of the Treaty of Chaguaramas and the other Caribbean Community agreements, if any entity in the Caribbean is producing sugar, all the others must buy it without duty impositions. If they want to go outside of the Caribbean to buy it, the governments have to impose a 40 per cent tariff on it. This creates a huge benefit for Guyana and Belize.
Packaged and bagged sugar in this region therefore does not earn 12 cents per pound, it is almost 3 times higher if you bag and package it, and if we can produce white sugar, it will earn much more per ton, since all the territories in CARICOM, Guyana included, needs white sugar to make soft drinks, sweets, chocolates etc. So it would be a huge asset to have, going forward. Ethanol is also very much more lucrative than using the cane to make sugar. Briefly Guyana takes between 13 to 15 tons of cane to make one ton of sugar [tc/ts]; Brazil and Australia are taking 7 tc/ts, this alone tells us that such a competition is unrealistic. But the sugar cane biomass from Guyana produces the same amount of ethanol per ton of cane as Brazil and Australia – about 20-22 gallons thus levelling the playing field considerably.
So it’s very clear we MUST mechanize effectively to survive and since today we are doing exactly what we did at Enmore and LBI to create machine friendly layouts, which were a complete disaster, we have to take the methods we are currently doing to create a friendly machine harvesting layout, back to the DRAWING board. I would like to state clearly that I do not seek any job in the sugar industry or anywhere else. At 77, I am not inclined to go to a desk daily, I am just showing what the actual situation is, since there is quite a lot of confusion about where we are, and where we must to go to prevail.
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira