By Audreyanna Thomas, 

Senior Communications Officer, GuySuCo

THE Guyana Sugar Corporation Inc. (GuySuCo) is currently undergoing one of its most dynamic, complex and turbulent periods in decades. The realities of the Corporation have created an urgency to act, and to act decisively and speedily. The leadership, management, employees and all stakeholders have to rethink the business in a way they have never done before; GuySuCo simply must become a more resilient business entity.‘Resilience’ in the GuySuCo context
Organizational resilience is the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond, and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper. GuySuCo has to develop business resilience, which is the ability to quickly adapt to disruptions while maintaining continuous business operations and safeguarding its employees and customers, and its assets and overall reputation.

On its way to becoming resilient, the corporation must contemplate being more efficient and deriving profits from the current core business, sugar. In this light, several engagements are being undertaken with both employees and stakeholders, to detail a programme for achieving more efficiencies and improved production in sugar.

Another important exercise is that the corporation is renewing its focus and revising its goals by developing a diversification programme. Future projections show a high probability that sugar will not be profitable over the next decade; this has therefore created the opportunity for GuySuCo to re-think whether its core business should still be sugar, even though the market indications are trending downwards. It is inconceivable that the highs of the former European Union (EU) preferential market would ever return.

A key aspect of developing a resilient business would require some degree of risk-taking. As a matter of fact, there is risk if the corporation chooses to act, and there is a greater risk if it does not act; and in this instance, timing is also of paramount importance.
A very critical point to note is that the corporation cannot only concentrate on surviving these challenging times, but must also craft a strategy for a prosperous future. It has to develop what some call the “psychological immunity” to, or the ability to, rebound from and withstand difficult seasons, and the only way to accomplish this is to diversify. Hence feasibility studies are being done in fruit crops, rice, aquaculture, dairy farming and livestock.

Leadership

GuySuCo is such a dynamic entity and player in communities and the society that it is important that a resilient culture and resilient leadership be further developed within the corporation – from the sugar cultivations all the way to the Board of Directors.

The diversification programme also enables the corporation to work on more than one time cycle — the short term, which is sugar production; and the long-term, meaning other ventures.

Due to the relationship between GuySuCo and the communities, there has always been a heavy dependence upon the corporation for the economic and social development of communities within the vicinity of sugar estates. As such, the economic downturn of the corporation has exposed a critical flaw in the development programme of these communities; that is, to a large extent, their growth and development depended on the efficiencies of the estates. Therefore, when the estates are not achieving their targets, this has a debilitating effect on progress in these areas.

Additionally, it puts a greater responsibility on GuySuCo to operate a successful business.
Nevertheless, the realities are grim, hence it has become imperative to go beyond GuySuCo transitioning into a resilient business; but the lesson learnt is that community development for areas around estates must also include a strategic programme to ensure that these communities become resilient.

Finally, with this awareness, moving forward would require much optimism; decisiveness; integrity; and open communication, both at the formal and informal levels, with employees and other stakeholders.

All must come on board!