Dear editor,

THERE is much commentary on government’s intent to restart sugar factories closed down by the PNC-led regime. I am fully supportive of the policy of rehabilitating the sugar estates and factories, including the one at Wales. Sugar can be very profitable if estates are managed properly and if the workers can be lured into ownership and the state provides management of grinding and marketing (value added).

During the preceding regime, too many individuals lost their jobs as a result of the shuttering of the estates and too many villages have become depressed as a result of a loss of income of tens of thousands of workers leading to myriad social problems. Besides, sugar cane is very important to Guyana’s economy and the navel strings of the ancestors are buried on those very lands (an emotional attachment that ties one to the land that belongs to the ancestors and their descendants). Sugar was king during slavery, throughout indentureship, and through the 1990s. In fact, for over three centuries, it was the largest foreign-exchange earner and employer). The indentured labourers saved the sugar plantations and it largely has remained profitable though the beginning of the 21st century. Sugar rescued Guyana’s economy and now sugar needs to be rescued to provide a breadline for workers who know nothing else but cane cultivation and harvesting. One cannot simply close down estates without providing an alternative for employment for the affected tens of thousands, especially when money that could have been used to help workers were used to fete hundreds of managerial staff and non-productive political hawks who were earning almost $1 million monthly with other perks for not even showing up at an office. Sugar production is back-breaking work. Those on the fields deserve that $1 Million monthly salary, not those who were sitting in air-conditioned offices exploiting the labour of workers. The PNC blew it on management. They returned to the policy of Burnham giving jobs to supporters who know absolutely nothing about cane-growing. I remember conversing with an Afro Guyanese mechanical engineer who said that Burnham had sent him to work management of GuySuCo when he knew nothing about cane cultivation. But for him, it was a well-paying job.

I grew up in the sugar and rice belt on the Corentyne – Ankerville, a sub-section of Plantation Port Mourant. Ankerville itself did not grow rice or sugar, but the backdam was a vast expanse of land for both. And I used to visit there daily, growing up looking after cows or even assisting family members and friends with tending to the farms in the reef where the cane and rice grew. Although I did not personally cultivate cane or rice, my family members did and I assisted as much as I could while I was in school. My parents did not want me on the land; they wanted me to become a doctor as every parent dreamed for their children. My grandparents, parents, and older siblings cultivated the land so that the younger ones like me and other brothers and sisters could get an education to get out of the cycle of subsistence farming, of back-breaking work in farms to eke out a living.

I know enough of cane-farming from my family encounters and from my own limited personal experience on the field as a youngster, as well as from conducting personal surveys (interviewing sugar workers and farmers) to conclude that cane will not be very successful in Guyana unless the worker is invested with some form of ownership. When I was in university in political science, I had a Professor, Randolph Braham, an expert on the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries and Marxism/Socialism. He always reminded the class that no worker would wake up at 4 AM to milk a socialist cow (owned by the state), or no worker would put in full energy to cultivate a crop in which he does not have ownership. He would do the bare minimum to get a salary equivalent to that of others who performed or not. But if one owns a farm, he would be up at 4 AM and toil non-stop until 6 PM to ensure that the crop has the care for growth with maximum productivity. In other words, ownership would encourage people to work harder because the profits, the productivity of their labour would be enjoyed by themselves, not some bureaucrats who instruct you what to do from an air- conditioned office.

When one is an employee, one does the bare minimum to meet the requirements of a paycheck. One is not motivated to do more than the minimum. Also, opportunities become available for corruption and to skylark and let the day and week go by without maximum productivity. On corruption, workers informed me that equipment and materials would be stolen and sold to private farmers. As much as half of the materials of GuySuCo are stolen rather then placed on the soil. Manure, for example, is pilfered. Molasses and sugar are stolen. Stealing is not confined to any one person; theft occurs from managerial level down to the labourer on the ground. There are also ghost gangs. Workers are paid for not showing up at the job site and they shared the loot with management. Workers would inflict self-wounds to stay home and collect NIS compensation or get days off with pay from work. There were all kinds of scams to cheat the system. The same was experienced in Trinidad where sugar was produced at a loss at the state company, Caroni, but was made profitable by private farmers.
In Trinidad, during the Panday administration, I personally championed giving sugar workers the Caroni land for cane cultivation, but Panday opted to sell the land for peanuts to his friend, Lawrence Duprey of Clico. Ramesh Maharaj, a human rights activist, refused to sign off on the deal in 2001 and was fired as attorney general, resulting in the collapse of Panday’s administration and his permanent loss of power. Ramesh wanted to give the land to the sugar workers while Panday and others, including Kamla, were in favour of giving the land to Duprey. When Manning returned as PM, he closed down Caroni and distributed the land to party supporters and financiers and offered a small plot to former workers – some of whom are yet to receive their plots 20 years after Caroni is closed. Kamla promised to resume sugar production but failed to implement the promise. She also failed to honour the promise to give all the workers their plots.

Sugar cane is labour-intensive, but it is necessary to be successful. You have to nurse the cane like a baby or if raising a child. The farmers treat the cane as their children. A paid worker would not. Yields would be tripled if not quadrupled in a private farm. Private cane-farming is known to outyield state production. Cane is planted in the hot sun and not during a rainy day. The farmer’s body is burning in heat. It is back-breaking work, bending down on the knees, juking cane, weeding, banking, fertilising, forking, cutting, and loading punts for which few had the stamina to do. One had to take advantage of opportunity sunny days to plant and care for the canes for harvesting. The land is prepared by building beds, making mares, farrowing (plowing and making valleys and ridges with shovel) it was called and then one had to juk the cane under the dirt (one or two knots), slanted at an angle, and at the right time manure the thriving cane. There is flood-fallowing, allowing for fertilisation of the soil. As the cane grows, the trash begins to fall from the cane stalk. One has to cut those dead leaves and bank that trash. Then there was weeding the small bush or cut thick vines around the cane. The rotten trash and weed make its own manure. Then the land is lightly forked with banking to aerate the soil. Aeration of roots was critical, a method that was well tried and tested for centuries that GuySuCo abandoned some years ago. The private farmers thrived on that workable method and have higher yields than GuySuCo. The farmers took pride in the cultivation and harvest. They performed their tass (tasks) efficiently, unlike at GuySuCo. (Using machines, while reducing manual labour of workers, damaged the soil, making it too compact for cane to thrive. The waterlogged soil is not suited for machinery for certain aspects of production. Machines recompact soil, making growth difficult. That is why every year, cane yields decline. Guyana’s soil is different from say Cuba or Trinidad or Fiji, or Mauritius for machine fertilising or harvesting). At the right time, the farmer bruk banding. Fishermen would come and set nets so as to catch fish (patwa, houri, hassar, jumper shrimps, etc., that develop during the six months of land-flooding. The land used to produce three tonnes per acre at one time although in India, one could get twice as much.

GuySuCo should reduce its role in cane cultivation. Now, it should prepare the land for cane production because they have become forests, thanks to the PNC’s ill-advised policy. The land should be parcelled out (say 15-acre plots) to the workers for individual cane-farming. Farmers would better produce cane than the state, because they take pride in ownership. Guysuco should manage the grinding factories, providing a service to the farmers to purchase and process their cane as is done throughout India and in various parts of Africa, where Indian experts own the factories and provide guidance on growth. Sugar production would be profitable as has been the case in Fiji, Mauritius, parts of Africa, and India if sugar workers are given ownership.

Yours truly,
Vishnu Bisram