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FM
Former Member

Sugar is too big to fail

 

The sugar industry was created by profit-motivated colonial overlords, but it is the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves and Indian indentured immigrants that have sustained this sector, which is so vital to national socio-economic constructs, through its many diverse products.Sugar is also inhered into the national psyche and socio-economic deliverables as no other industry, except perhaps rice could ever be, no matter how economically viable new and emerging sectors become in the nation’s developmental landscape.
‘Sugar is too big to fail’ was told to the nation by Minister Frank Anthony in his Budget presentation and reiterated ad nauseum by every Government Minister; but most poignant is the cry of the sugar workers at the threatening pronouncements by the joint Opposition (APNU and AFC), because their lives and livelihoods, and that of their families are dependent on sustaining the viability of this vital industry, which the Opposition is heartlessly and unconscionably threatening to starve of funds – not taxpayers’ money, like the Linden electricity subsidy, but monies provided as a concessionary grant by the European Union to cushion the negative impacts to the industry because of the cessation of the EU protected prices formerly enjoyed by ACP countries.

Sugar is too big to fail; but the myopic Opposition needs to understand why this is so. Sugar workers and their families are not ‘collateral’ to Opposition power and self-aggrandisement hunger, and the damage will be done to fathers, mothers, children, grandparents, all with their own peculiar needs that the sugar industry provides.
Guyana and sugar are inseparable: No, make that Guyana, sugar, the PPP and the Father of the Nation, Dr. Cheddi Jagan are inseparable; the country, the sustainer, the defender and the protector. Sugar sustains this nation’s economy and its social development in a multiplicity of ways. Closing the sugar industry down would detrimentally affect the lives and livelihoods of uncountable people ranging in the tens of thousands – directly and indirectly: from owners and employees in the manufacturing sector, including beverage giants Banks DIH and DDL, to the simple sugar cake and juice vendor. Sugar and rice sectors –as did every sector in this country, hit rock bottom under the PNC administration, because the elitists have never respected agricultural workers.

Under the PNC watch, the sugar and rice industries reached a low where those commodities had to be imported for local consumption, as rice reached a production level per annum of an approximate 94,000 tonnes and the rice saved for local consumption was what our grandparents used to feed chickens – broken and dirty; and the beet sugar from Guatemala was the only available sugar on the market.

The joint Opposition wants us to return to those days – an assumption that the Guyanese public has reached based on the Opposition’s pronouncements, threats and actions, even before the tenth Parliament convened for the first time and the Budget of 2012 was presented in the National Assembly.

The sugar industry is in this precarious position to admittedly a great extent as a result of the restructured EU sugar protocols; but recovery of this sector has been made extremely difficult primarily because the PNC Government had closed the most productive estates and destroyed cane lands to rear pigs and plant some orange trees that never bore any marketable amount of fruits, just because former President Burnham reportedly wanted revenge against some sugar workers who had slighted him at Leonora.

Additionally, in order to subsidize the bauxite industry and free electricity to Lindeners, as well as the Guyana National Service, the Public Service and the security services (which ironically were being used to oppress and suppress PPP members and supporters – mainly from the sugar belt, to the extent of murdering ordinary citizens who were attempting to defend the integrity of ballot boxes) they imposed a draconian levy on the sector that robbed the estates of revenues and resources to re-capitalise its operational and production systems. So the equipment and infrastructure currently in use are original mills and structures constructed and installed by the colonials and are more decrepit than some people who continue to hold office despite the fact that they have long passed their years of serviceability, leading to a degraded state of the once famous garden city.

The profits from sugar, instead of being used to benefit the workers in the industry and to sustain the sector were instead diverted to subsidize the bauxite industry, Lindeners and the public and security services, while sugar workers were robbed of every right.

Sugar workers are hard-working people who know how to improvise with little or no resources, and they do not destroy the systems that provide their families with sustenance for survival, even when they protest at the perennial injustices done to them; because they are responsible and caring.

They do not have a dependency syndrome but they do expect justice and fairplay from the administration. If the administration is prepared to aid other sectors to keep them afloat until they can once more attain viability why are they not being allowed to do so for the industry that is the parent of all industries in this country? The Opposition perception that they will be hurting the PPP by strangling the sector of funds because they assume that they are all PPP supporters is erroneous, because there are hundreds of Opposition members employed at GuySuCo, especially the administrative and clerical staff, mainly holding cushy jobs in offices while the majority PPP supporters labour in all weathers at the back-breaking work in the fields.
The PPP is rejecting every move by the Opposition to close down the Demerara estates and/or to eliminate sugar altogether from the national productive demographics. Can anyone imagine tens of thousands of people suddenly becoming redundant in the nation’s workforce and the implications to the nation’s socio-economic dynamics? But since when did the PNC care about the nation’s workforce, except to make them cannon fodder?

Most persons in sugar-producing communities are employed in the sugar estates, and they spend their entire lives working there. If those estates are closed, the entire community would be negatively affected. For instance, the community of Canje – several villages, actually the entire Canje bloc will die, because practically all other businesses are dependent on the continued viability of the estate to survive.

Another example is the Leonora sugar factory. This newspaper has, in its employ, a journalist who interviewed people at Leonora several years after Forbes Burnham had closed the sugar factory in that community.
The depression, as well as the consequent economic and social downturn and degradation that followed was palpable and visibly evident in this once-thriving community, and which the residents of that community believe was destroyed because someone threw an egg at Burnham and he vowed to destroy the community.

He did it by closing the most productive sugar estate at that time. The community was strangled economically as a result and its consequential social deterioration was swift and impacted detrimentally on all aspects of life.
This then is the history of the PNC and the sugar sector (APNU has now been seen as a new wineskin to camouflage the fact that the wine is the same old fermentation and taste); but it is the actions and the stated intentions of the AFC – primarily former PPP supporters Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo, who, through affiliation with Dr. Jagan, to whom sugar workers were specially dear, and who were the voters that gave them their seven seats in Parliament, should know of the agony that is being felt by sugar workers and their families at this threat to their survival, which is shocking employees in the sugar industry, because these former PPP members know the economic and social demographics of the sector, which is glaring evidence that they have no other uses for the workers but as ‘collateral damage in their craze for power, riches and self-aggrandizement.
But for the Government, sugar is ‘…too big to fail’ and they have continued to demonstrate that they will never give up on the heartland of Guyana, and the mother of all industries. The PNC, AFC, et al, will always promise; but it is the PPP/C Government that always delivers to the people. Maybe not all at once or immediately, because we do have various constraints as a developing nation, but bit by bit the PPP is delivering all that Dr. Cheddi Jagan envisaged for Guyana and the Guyanese people, Opposition gerrymandering notwithstanding.

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