By Mark Jacobs
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GUYSUCO) has a new Chief Executive Office and the government of the day is busy trying to deceive the population into thinking sugar is coming back. Nothing could be further from the truth.
CEO Sasenarine Singh in his daily talking points keeps repeating that he will pull this off because the President has faith in him. Well if faith was the only thing needed in turning GUYSUCO around we would not be having any public discussions about this industry. I am not sure what is Mr. Singh’s connection to cane or GUYSUCO but he is using a lot of jargon and campaign speech which will not accomplish the task before him. As far as the president is concerned, he was born and raised in Uitvlugt. In the psychedelic universe in which we find ourselves, this and faith may be all the qualification needed to bring GUYSUCO back from the dead.
GUYSUCO has lost money selling bulk sugar going on over a decade now. This is publicly available information released by the corporation itself. This being the case, the only plausible exit strategy for the government from this mess is a big oil payday. This money would then be used to pay off GUYSUCO skyrocketing debt and another excuse would then be proffered as to why the industry should not be closed down.
Mr. Singh is ably assisted by Tony Vieira who has promoted himself as a cane expert. The Vieira family was one of the largest cane growers in Guyana and even had their own estate. The public is also aware that Tony Vieira sold most if not all of his assets and is no longer in the cane business. What was the Vieira estate is now being turned into multi-million dollar mega mansions. If cane was so lucrative and has the potential to be again, why is the Vieira family not in the cane business?
Mr. Vieira is no different than most old men in Guyana. Their knowledge and information are dated and for the most part irrelevant in today’s market. They suffer from stultification. They’ve done it to others and willingly or unwillingly have also done it to themselves. They are lost in a sea of nonsense, but in the kingdom of the blind, the cockeye man is always king
Mr. Singh himself recently did an extensive interview with the Guyana Chronicle, and this was very informative. “Well to get back into sugar production, that’s the bottom line, but what we want to do is to move more up the value chain into packaged sugar…so right across the river from Rose Hall there is a packaging plant at Blairmont, so we want to leverage that more,” said Singh.
GUYSUCO target productions for 2020 was 14,162 tonnes sugar. The goal was to produce 46,475 tonnes on the first crop and 67,687 tonnes on the second crop. As of July after the first crop was completed the corporation produced 37,015 tonnes of sugar. This was 9,460 tonnes below target. They claimed 66,000 tonnes of cane was not harvested and they are going to make up the shortfall in the second crop. However, this is not a realistic goal.
66,000 tonnes of cane will produce approximately 6600 tons of sugar if GUYSUCO tonne cane/tonne sugar ratio is at 10. The problem is, GUYSUCO has never hit 1 ton of sugar from 10 tonnes of cane at no point in the last three decades. Their ratio is generally between 14 to 20 and sometimes higher. So even in a theoretical perfect storm they still will not achieve the targets they are putting out.
GUYSUCO and the PPP has been playing this game on the Guyana public for over two decades. In the weeks ahead, we will examine their own numbers and show why this is a ponzi scheme of mass proportions.
