Guyana’s sugar industry has always been a significant employer of labour. Sugar has always been a significant export commodity. For some time, however, the industry has been experiencing falling production and rising employment and production costs with the result that selling sugar above the world market price makes it uncompetitive. The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) for several decades, had been reliant on the European market which provided assured access and preferential prices for sugar. Those preferences, however, were lost by the second decade of this century, accelerating the industry’s downward spiral from which it has never recovered.
Former President David Granger, speaking on the programme – The Public Interest – recalled that, following the termination of European Union’s (EU) sugar preferences and budgetary support to compensate for the reduction in preferential market prices, EU finally cancelled funding resulting in Guyana’s having to sell its sugar on the world market at a price lower than the production cost.
The People’s Progressive Party’s (PPP)’s response to the costly production crisis was to establish the East Demerara Estate by amalgamating the Diamond, Enmore and La Bonne Intention estates’ cultivations and operations. The PPP took 4,000 hectares out of cane cultivation at Diamond estate in 2010 and attempted to transfer the employees. GuySuCo offered the workers employment at the La Bonne Intention Estate on the East Coast but this was rejected by a majority who lived far away. GAWU was obliged to take GuySuCo to court which ruled that the employees be paid severance.
GAWU, in fact, created an unstable industrial relations climate by frequently fomenting strikes and work stoppages in East Demerara – in 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2015 – over what it described as poor management practices, poor working conditions and poor decision-making in relation to the closure of the estates. GuySuCo-GAWU negotiations about wages collapsed in acrimony in 2009 with the Corporation declaring that it had no more money to satisfy the Union’s demands.
Mr. Granger recalled that the PPP was obliged to launch a commission of inquiry in 2010 into the unfolding chaos in East Demerara which restated what was already known – poor management supervision, poor staff training; poor production and productivity; poor maintenance; poor industrial relations; poor funding in favour of the Skeldon modernisation programme; low retention of skilled workers and obsolete mechanical infrastructure. Other contributory factors to the decline were the emigration of experienced managers, exhaustion of money and the deterioration 0f field infrastructure and factories.
The PPP knowingly destroyed the sugar industry in East Demerara after its decision to concentrate its efforts in the East Berbice estates. This decision was compounded by its own misconceptions, miscalculations and mismanagement evident in estate closures, exorbitant salary increases to workers at GAWU’s behest and diverting funds from East Demerara to East Berbice – all occurring when the industry was operating at a loss. In fact, even as the industry was recording huge losses, employment costs soared by 43 per cent or $6.3 billion. The PPP administration demitted office in 2015 bequeathing a debt to the APNU+AFC Coalition administration of over $82 billion.
The PPP’s management of the sugar industry resulted not only in irreparable damage to the industry but, also, the dismissal of about 6,000 employees. During the PPP regime, workers perceived that the industry was dying and continued to quit the Corporation which was unable to recruit new workers.
The former President was of the view that the PPP presided over an industry infected by political partisanship, inefficient management practices and unsettled industrial relations. The entire population is still bearing the burden of the PPP’s scuttling of the East Demerara sugar industry.
