GUYSUCO will not make a profit until the majority of its cultivated land is harvested using mechanised cane harvesters. The days are numbered wherein human beings have to toil in the hot sun in slave-like conditions, manually harvesting cane. We must level with the people and help them to understand that their future lies in climbing up the employment value chain into roles such as auto-electricians and machine operators within the industry. Plus, the children of these cane cutters will be hard pressed to consider cutting cane with a cutlass as a profession. People’s appetite for this slave-like working condition has reached an all-time low, plus there is no business case for this type of cane harvesting in the world anymore; it is too inefficient.

But harvesting sugar cane is also a tough job for any machine. The sucrose content in the cane stalk is greatest at ground level, and the regrowth process is swifter if the cane is cut as close as possible to the base. This does present a challenge for the machines. If the land is not properly prepared and laid out, the mechanised harvesters will not work optimally, and can miss the best part of the sugar cane. This will cause much loss for the industry.

But do we have a choice? Can we continue with this same model of having more manual harvesting vs mechanised harvesting? Certainly not! Manual harvesting of sugar cane is one of the core reasons for the sinking of the industry, because it is extremely inefficient compared to the harvesting practice around the world. But we need some level of manual harvesting over the next 10-15 years, to prevent social and societal implosion in rural Demerara and Berbice. This is certainly not a legacy that our Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo, who stood with the sugar belt for 50 plus years, can live with; and thus we can expect that the industry will always have the ears of the government at the highest levels.

In spite of this socio-political inclination, mechanisation has to be accelerated, and that requires heavy funding. So where are we on this mechanisation project? The evidence reveals that, in 2009, GuySuCo spent some G$450 million to purchase six mechanised cane harvesters for the Skeldon Estate, since all the newly developed lands on that estate were being designed to accommodate mechanised harvesting. The Broad Camber English Beds are most suitable for mechanised cane harvesting, but the rate of conversation has been a struggle, as the industry continued to bleed cash and suffered from gross mismanagement under Raj Singh. The magnitude of conversion per estate remains at a “back-breaking,” slow pace, with Skeldon being the most advanced in the process.

Under the Hanoman/Bhim/Raj Singh plan, which started as far back as 2008, the expectation was that all existing lands across the industry which are suitable for mechanisation would have been converted by the end of 2014. The plan then was for 44 percent of the total harvestable lands to be prepared and made ready for mechanised harvesting. IT DID NOT HAPPEN for a variety of reasons, but the principal driver of this failure was a poorly designed and executed Turnaround Plan under the leadership of the Gopaul Board. It was clear that the leadership team failed to properly understand and acclimatise itself with the cash-flow situation in the industry. This only confirmed what we already knew — GuySuCo has a very poor record of rigorous financial and strategic analysis. The leadership team has to relearn the process of getting into the detailed cost analysis and bring back fact-based options to drive decisions. Only last week we saw evidence of this when the minister sent the CoI Team back to the drawing board to bring a better quality of quantifiable evidence on how their recommendations will be priced, and what direct financial impact it will have on the industry. There is no room for “fluff and puff” and theory in this CoI Report. We want the hard facts – where we are financially; what are your recommendations; what will these recommendations cost the nation, and how best can we achieve the desired outcome within what kind of time frame using what kind of technology.

The dream in the current dispensation is to have about 55 percent of the total harvestable land being reaped using machines, and the remaining 45 percent by humans. That way, jobs will be preserved, and the industry will be on a firmer financial footing because of the greater efficiency of the machines. Of course, we are very far away from that dream since, as at the end of 2014, I was advised that only about 35 percent of the total area under sugar cane cultivation (excluding the private lands) has been converted to accommodate mechanical harvesting.

The arithmetic will show that using a mechanised harvester in Guyana is a more productive process. Data collected by Guysuco in 2014 revealed that manual labour spends some G$4,295 to harvest a tonne of sugarcane, while with mechanised harvesters the cost drops to about G$1,100. With a mechanised harvester at work, Guysuco can reap about 30 tonnes per hour while using manual labour we can only reap about 2.5 tonnes per hour. As labour availability declines as the young people move away from this semi-slave like job, this entire transformation to mechanization will serve the industry well.

Thus, the entire outlook of the industry has to be about moving away from focusing on cane-cutters to mechanising cane harvesting incrementally. But this transition will not be easy, since the conversion process is extremely expensive, and that is why there has to be cash injection into the industry, for at least the next four years if we follow a stringent work plan to match the 55 percent mechanisation rate. The quantum has to be properly computed by the CoI as they price all their recommendations.

With mechanisation, many workers will have to be retrained to move up the value chain to becoming service providers in the sugar industry. There will be opportunities in professions such as machine operators, mechanics, auto-electricians and so on. These employment opportunities will all pay better than what a cane-cutter gets today. Some may even migrate to factory jobs and some to other industries or their own businesses, but change has to come to GuySuCo if it is to survive.

Please share any feedback to sasesin1@yahoo.com. Until next week.