Dear Editor,
I refer to two letters in the SN newspaper recently, one letter from former GuySuCo Chairman Vic Oditt who wrote “The change to raw instead of refined sugar and other factors led to the failure of the Skeldon modernization project.” Fundamentally, I completely agree with most of what was written by Mr. Oditt except for “as to why GuySuCo’s diffuser did not perform as expected revealed that the costly mechanical harvesters that were purchased, were totally unsuited to our field layouts in that they scooped up earth from the fields along with cane roots.” Actually, my opinion is that the field layout that was finally put in place by GuySuCo at Skeldon was, and still is, unfriendly to any mechanical harvesting made on planet earth, it’s what I have been saying all along. They did not then, nor do they now have a machine friendly mechanical harvester field layout. Editor, they did not buy the wrong harvester, they had the wrong field layout. Frighteningly, the same people who made that gross mistake are still very present in the company today at even higher levels of management hell bent on making the same mistakes guaranteeing the same failures.
The second letter I wish to refer to, was published yesterday captioned “The president should revisit the feasibility test conducted to rehabilitate 5,000 Ha of land at Skeldon Estate” by one Ash Sen; I only have two small comments, Editor, (1) I want to thank those who congratulated me on writing that letter, however, I do not write under any name other than Tony Vieira, and (2), Otherwise this was a well-researched and well written letter, and I support it 100%. As for the Enmore packaging plant fiasco, let me say first, it puzzles me which category of former sugar workers who were displaced by the estate’s closure would have been qualified to work at a call center. Secondly, closing the Enmore packaging plant was not such a great idea for two reasons (a) the cost of building the bond to hold the bags and packages will be more costly than the actual equipment for bagging and packaging which will now have to be built at Albion, and (b) the obsolete equipment for bagging and packaging currently existing at Enmore is not food grade quality, and so a better plan would have been to dismantle the old packaging plant and replace it with a food grade plant and leave it there.
As far as the refinery is concerned, Guyana is currently making sugar at between 50 to 60 US cents per pound, a privately owned refinery will inevitably refuse to buy GuySuCo’s sugar since it is so expensive, so that refinery would be left with two options, (a) force GuySuCo to sell sugar at fair market value plus tariffs, and make huge losses in the sales, or (b) bring raw sugar from Guatemala, refine and sell the white made from that sugar throughout the Caribbean nations. There is something so diabolical in this plan, that it frightens me, and I will outline the possibility at a later time if they proceed with it.
Now for the piece de resistance this pack of jokers are planning on bringing cane from Cuba, Brazil etc. to be planted here!! Of all the stupidity this government has proposed or created in GuySuCo, this one takes the cake. Having placed the most inappropriate person in charge of the industry since 2021 who practically destroyed the already ailing local sugar industry, they are about to bury it. For centuries it was known that a new variety bred and selected in one country may not be successful in another country. When I became a Booker Cadet, I spent my first 8 months at the Sophia Sugar Experimental Station, then run by the highly respected Vibert Yong Kong, later Director of Agriculture for GuySuCo. We had seed from Barbados, from Jamaica even Hawaii and we germinated them in almost laboratory conditions. After they grew to a reasonable height we cut them down at 6 months and germinated them eye by eye in sand, then we transferred them to small field plots to multiply them. When enough material was available, the various varieties were sent to the estates where field trials would be performed to determine the most successful varieties under the Guyana field conditions.
Editor, you can’t bring a Cuban cane variety here and use it as material for commercial planting… you can bring a few stalks of it here, and after a decade of multiplying it and selecting it under the Guyana field conditions of heavy, poorly drained acid soil and high rainfall, and if successful, it can be released for field production. You can’t bring a cane from Brazil or Cuba after nearly a decade of trials in dry, well drained loam soils, low rainfall and different temperature, and expect this cane to have similar success here. These selection processes can take decades of field expansion and trials. And there is always an element of danger in the process, for example, in the early 70’s we had a variety the ID of which was HJ 5741 a Hawaiian seed H, selected in Jamaica – J, bred in (19)57, in batch No. 41, hence HJ5741. It was sent to Guyana for extension and trials in our fields. It proved to be a very good performer at first, but just 7 or 8 years later, this variety being very susceptible to the smut disease, caused such a substantial increase in the spores of the smut fungus, that by share mass action it affected the other commercial varieties and almost closed the Guyana sugar industry down. Every stalk of this variety had to be quite literally roughed out of our entire system. Expensive!!
More than once I have advised the President that the Ministry of Agriculture, [MOA] of Guyana is totally lost in a sea of ignorance, confusion and is embarrassing to the President who is using advice they are feeding him, which are almost always leaving him with eggs on his face! For a nation which prides itself on being the bread basket of the Caribbean, we have diligently sought the worst possible people to man our MOA.
Sincerely,
Tony Vieira
