General-Secretary of the RPA
The RPA felicitates GAWU on its 19th Congress and bids the champion of the sugar industry fraternal greetings and good wishes as it faces the new and emerging challenges in the industry.

There were many important correlations between the rice and sugar industries, but the primary one is the championship and leadership of the father of the Guyanese nation, Dr Cheddi Jagan.

While the world knows of Dr. Jagan’s unrelenting solidarity with the sugar workers, few knew that he was also simultaneously championing the rice sector, and it has always been under a PPP Government that the rice sector flourished. Dr. Jagan served as president of the fourth elected General Council of the RPA from 1956 – 1959.

But more than this direct association, he has been the guiding force behind the production and developmental dynamics of the rice sector, even while it was under siege by the authoritarian forces, when farmers abandoned their lands in droves because of the oppression which they faced, making rice production a non-viable enterprise.

While sugar production was the driving force determining the decisions taken by the plantocracy to import slaves and indentured servants to British Guiana, it was these bonded people’s determination to survive and thrive that created gigantic industries from these two sectors.

The sugar barons imported paddy from the Carolinas in the USA, which they converted into rice with dehullers installed in the sugar mills as a cheap source of food for their slaves and indentured servants.

But it was runaway African slaves who first planted some paddy stolen from the planters in the backlands of Mahaicony.

Although they were re-captured and their farms were destroyed, they had planted more than rice. They had planted the idea in the minds of the sugar barons to allow slaves to cultivate rice in small quantities to satisfy their own consumption as a more viable and cost-effective option than importation of the product from the distant Carolinas.

However, they (and circumstances) did not allow production for commercial purposes because they did not want a parallel industry which could provide a possible challenge to sugar.

It was the Indian indentured immigrants, accustomed to achieving under the direst situations of privation, who took rice production to a different level, and the development of the rice sector is the most important contributory factor to the financial emancipation of the Indian indentured immigrant. Many thriving rice-farming areas were developed on abandoned sugar plantations.

Dr. Jagan wrote in ‘The West on Trial’: “Another front on which I fought vigorously was that of land reform, rent control and security of tenure. Referring to the Puerto Rican Foraker “500-acre” Act, I suggested that there should be a limit to the holdings of sugar estates, that land leased by the planters but kept idle must be released.” (to be cultivated by freed slaves and indentured servants).

“I proposed a progressive land tax for uncultivated lands, pointing out that this would force the sugar planters and others who held land idle to release them. I recommended blocking the loopholes in the 1945 Rice Farmers Security of Tenure Ordinance which fixed rentals and prevented the eviction of tenants (which protected the sugar barons and other powerful forces and enabled them to retain their hold on arable lands which they were not using); also that lands leased by the sugar planters for rice-growing should come within the purview of this law. I suggested that a similar law be enacted to protect tenants of lands used for growing crops other than rice. But all these attempts failed.”

Dr. Jagan also fought for a comprehensive scheme of water control to facilitate drainage and irrigation.

But Dr. Jagan’s initial efforts, though having little impact on the Colonial Government, were not in vain, because all his ideas fructified in very substantial ways when he first took office as Premier, and then subsequently as Executive President of Guyana in 1992.

The Father of this Nation began his fight for our freedoms in the sugar sector, but every worker in every sector in this country has much to thank him for, not least being the rice industry.

Today, with the opening of the Skeldon sugar factory and related activities, sugar production is taking on a new dimension to confront the global dynamics that are threatening the viability of the sugar industry, but the RPA is convinced that Guyana’s sugar industry will prevail, and that the GAWU would continue to champion the workforce of Guyana’s premier industry for generations to come.