THE Sugar Wars are over, and we have lost. As the industry slowly winds down with the recent closure of some Berbice estates, I want to point to two clarifying questions. First, why did we produce sugar here? Second, when did the purpose of sugar stop being to make profits?

The first question should help Guyanese understand why we won the war for so long, and the second why we eventually fell.
As a reminder from our social studies text books, Guyana produced tobacco at one point, before switching to our most famous crop. This is because the best places to grow tobacco are Cuba and the Carolinas, and the best place to grow sugar is Guyana.

Those writing about cuts to GuySuCo should recognise that the administration is merely cleaning up after the battle, after we already knew the industry was unsustainable. The moment that sugar became about employment rather than profits, it was all going to fall eventually.

This thinking creates perverse incentives, pushing us towards the wrong decisions for the industry rather than the right ones.
This is not to say that we don’t want sugar to provide employment, but rather that a different national strategy could have both preserved jobs and grown the industry.
To clarify how far off the rails we went, I’ll draw on the surprisingly analogous history of Frederick the Great, described by Napoleon as the greatest general.

When Frederick came to power in Prussia, a small German state, he found his father had left him one of the largest and most militarily capable armies in Europe. Legacy of the Prussian independence struggle, Frederick had to decide whether to dismantle the army or use it.

This is quite similar to the situation in which we found ourselves when our protected European prices started to slip away. We had a massive, well-developed industry operating in the best possible conditions in the world at our disposal.
At college, I remember coming across brown sugar from Hawaii, and as excited as I was to try it, I had to use so much in my tea I thought I would get diabetes! I was used to Guyanese sugar, which is much sweeter, and thus far less is required.

Those types of competitive advantages come from producing things for prolonged periods of time, and the Hawaiians were about 200 years behind. Similarly, because of the long Prussian independence struggle, Frederick had an analogous advantage, in that his veteran troops could fire about twice as quickly as his opponents.

Making use of this, he went out of his way to fight whenever he was on relatively even footing, knowing that he would always be able to overwhelm his enemies. What this means is that if we had been able to get Guyanese sugar close to our competitors’ prices, we could have leveraged our sweeter sugar to aggressively compete them out of business.

But even at the height of our efforts to save the industry, building the Skeldon plant, we still were using language like “keep estates open.” The goal was to preserve employment, especially as that industry had historically supported the administration of the time. Because we were focused on employment, the difficult conversations needed to return the industry to profitability just couldn’t happen.

We may not have been able to prevent laying off some workers, but is that any better than the current situation? Instead, many workers could have been retrained to facilitate and maintain more mechanised plantations, especially if our goal was to expand acreage planted to compete in new markets.

Rather than a slow death, expansion would have driven employment in the industry, and maybe, just maybe, things would be different in Berbice.
The international economy is structured such that countries must take a realistic look at where they have competitive advantages and expand, pressing those home.

We may not now be able to save sugar, but we can learn from this as we move forward. Guyana also produces the world’s finest rum. It should be our national mission to drive firms like Bacardi, with their bitter, watery rum, out of business.

Plantation closures will always be difficult to stomach, but if our national approach remains only fostering employment rather than also increasing competitiveness, it’s hard to see other industries reaching their true potential.

The lessons from the Sugar War were bitter, but if we learn from them, the future will taste a lot better.