In spite of the coalition leaders’ promise to keep the sugar industry alive, adopting the “sugar is too big to fail” mantra, the steps they have taken so far seem intended to dismantle this vital industry, which is the mainstay of entire communities.
Today, along with entire estates, the livelihood of sugar workers and the survival of thousands of families are on the chopping block.
During the tenure of the previous Government, despite the challenges facing the survival of the industry, sugar workers’ pay packets were assured, as were their incentive bonuses, no matter how small. Also, their retirement benefits were cast in stone.
The People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Administration was determined to sustain the industry, and it strove with a multiplicity of interventions to make sugar production viable again.
At the commissioning of the packaging facility at Enmore in May of 2011, then President BharratJagdeo, addressing Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) management and staff, and workers in the industry’s ancillary services, reiterated his pledge that the PPP/C government would always provide sustained support to “…an industry in which you work, an industry that provides a living for thousands of people, an industry that contributes to our national economy in innumerable ways; in fact, 16 per cent of our [Gross Domestic Product] GDP comes directly from this industry”.
One can draw parallels to indicate the quantum of this amount and its importance to the national economy. In the United Kingdom, for instance, the financial sector contributes just five per cent to that country’s GDP, yet, when there is turmoil in that industry, it threatens to create decades of stagnation in that economy and economies related to it.
“So the sugar industry is vital for Guyana, not just for sugar workers, but there are some realities to this industry, and the path to success will not be easy…but we have to succeed…there is no other choice,” Jagdeo warned.
As he reminded his audience, “We have kept the sugar industry alive in Guyana when sugar industries right across the world – including in the Caribbean – are failing.”
In the waning years of the millennium, several Caribbean islands scrapped their sugar industries in the wake of difficulties faced as a consequence of the European Union (EU) price cuts several years prior. As a result of these unilateral price cuts, Guyana’s sugar prices were 36 per cent less than they were five years prior, which resulted in approximately G$9 billion (US$45 million) in lost or reduced revenue every year. Detractors had a field day, increasingly, pessimistically prognosticating doom-and-gloom scenarios and advocating relinquishing the sector because they envisaged the problems and challenges in the sugar industry as being insurmountable.
However, the then President adamantly assured the stakeholders of the industry that working together Government, workers, and management could make the industry once again successful, despite the very difficult environment – apart from the price cuts. He cited as one of the major challenges facing the industry, the high level of volatility and erratic weather patterns due to global warming. Since then, turnaround plan after turnaround plan has been tried with limited success and billions in subsidies. Some argue that the industry is a drain on the economy and should be rationalised.
Others believe that the naysayers and doom-and-gloom prophets are fulfilling their own prognostications of the imminent closure of the sugar sector, and are relishing sounding the death knell of the survival systems of entire communities, because their perception is that sugar is a PPP/C enclave and destroying the sector would be dismantling the support base of the PPP/C, disregarding the fact that their own supporters are also being affected.
