FORMER Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s PNM government shut down Trinidad’s sugar industry in 2003, and fired about 10,000 predominantly Indian sugar workers,  claiming the Caroni sugar industry was failing. It still operates with a skeleton staff.

The sugar workers formed the backbone of the UNC opposition party which was led by Basdeo Panday. With the PNC-advertised plans to privatise Guyana’s sugar industry  (calculating that it will self destruct),  will Trinidad’s PNM ‘final solution’ of scrapping its sugar industry be repeated  in Guyana? Before Manning shut down the sugar industry, he signed an enticing agreement with the sugar union to award them back pay, insurance benefits and compensatory parcels of land for farming and housing from the 78,000-acre sugar estate.

The PNM intelligentsia believed that the sugar industry was the glue that held Indian workers together as a united political force. The logic was that once the sugar industry was dissolved, the political base of the Indian-based UNC would be destroyed. PNM calculations sought to engineer the demise of its political opposition by creating economic disarray. All this political thinking and strategising happened, while the PNM continued subsidising other failing Trinidad companies e.g the oil company Petrotrin, BWIA and  the national steel company because these companies were predominantly staffed by PNM supporters.
But immediately after the signed agreement, PNM supporters started agitating for lands which were legally owed to the retrenched sugar workers. The issue of honouring the agreement for compensation, back pay and land for continued development of agriculture to their countrymen [project housing] then became a racially charged issue. Were the PNM’s original plans specifically designed to get the sugar workers to sign the agreement when Manning had absolutely no plan to honour it?

With blacks demanding entitlement to land based on their slave history, the PNM’s government compensation package to Trinidad’s sugar workers became a lost cause even when challenged and won in court. In order to stabilise Guyana’s sugar industry, the PNC imposed the sugar levy which skimmed the fat off the sugar profits. The levy was reviewed and terminated by President Jagdeo, but the industry soon faced new problems.
Worldwide global warming drastically affected sugar productivity, but
it was the termination of the European sugar quota guaranteeing Guyana favourable prices which became burdensome. Now many fear  that the openly Afro-centric PNC’s David Granger  would  apply  the  PNM ‘final solution’ of  the sugar industry, to  Guyana, without reservations.
Any attempt by the PNC, already pledged to privatise sugar, will no doubt create enormous political tension among Guyanese. Such a scenario does not augur well for either political stability or racial harmony