SINCE the socio-economic institution of the sugar industry so powerfully dominated the history of Guyana, financial records directly related to the estates are vital for the public. Our sugar estates continually draws attention to the heavy capital invested in drainage, sea defence, irrigation and transport systems, wages and salaries.

Many of the corporation’s assets are either not being used at all or are producing below capacity. It still has far too many hectares of good agricultural land which are either idle or inefficiently utilised.

The sugar industry have for the past years been producing well below capacity. Poor management, manifested at times in the sugar industry. Let’s look at the Versailles Dairy Farm, the farm originally started with breeds of animals purchased in America and airlifted to Guyana.

The stock of 207 heads of cattle’s was sold to members of the public. Twenty-eight employees were severed, based on my own investigation it was learnt that 50 dairy cattle would be maintained by the corporation at Uitvlugt Estate. The herd which was to be taken to Uitvlugt Estate was producing milk for the corporation’s hierarchy, while it was unwilling to promote milk production to benefit the nation. A well-established modern farm with a number of pens for the animals, a building for the administrative staff, a milking parlour with suitable milking machines, a modern cheese factory and an artesian well, were all in place from the time of the farm’s inauguration in 1985. From the inception of the farm, the corporation pumped millions of dollars literally, to keep it operable over the past 17 years.

It is estimated that the farm was subsidised by over $1.2 billion since it was created. GuySuCo’s management made colossal blunders when it decided to establish the farm for there seems to have been no feasibility study on the establishment of the cheese factory. The cheese factory did operate for some months, but the art of producing cheese was never achieved. Management also blundered in contracting the workforce under conditions prevailing in the sugar industry. Thus workers and managers were enjoying incentives payment similar to those payable to workers of estates based on sugar production.

In 1990, when Booker-Tate was hired to manage the sugar industry, the government approved a request of the foreign contractor not to elevate the status and operation of the farm, but to concentrate only on the sugar business. It is sad, for what should have been a lucrative model Dairy Farm in the Caribbean, is now a decrepit. A milk pasteurisation plant would have been a more sensible investment.

With such a plant, small farmers in the country could have sold their milk to the farm.
MOHAMED KHAN