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Guyana’s President, Dr. Irfaan Ali says the Opposition for neglecting the Sugar Industry as well as other industries such as the Rice Industry and the Bauxite Industry and has also accused the Opposition of mismanaging key sectors while they were in office from 2015 to 2020. The Peoples Progressive Party (PPP)-led government closed the Diamond Sugar Estate in 2011 and the LBI Sugar Estate in 2012, during their first 23 years in Government.
According to a Stabroek News Editorial dated June 1, 2015, “The PPP/C will be harshly judged by history for its dereliction of duty towards thousands of sugar workers and an important segment of the economy. While the party has remained silent on the virtual bankruptcy of GuySuCo declared last week by its handpicked CEO, Dr Rajendra Singh, the sugar unions and the majority of workers in the industry will know that the problems accreted over the last decade and have gathered a momentum that now threatens the survival of the heavily indebted corporation. Instead of showing the leadership required over the last 10 years, the PPP/C opted for innumerable excuses and kept on returning to the same pool of its loyalists in a bid to return the sugar corporation to viability. Nothing worked and paralysed by the fear of having to apply painful prescriptions to an industry in which its vital and historic political constituency is employed, the PPP defaulted on its governance covenant with the people.”
According to the editorial, “faced with a similarly serious problem, then President Hoyte in 1990 took the courageous decision to hand the management of the industry over to Booker Tate. Progressively, field performance and sugar production began to grow until 2005, the year of the Great Flood, declining since then on many fronts coupled with vastly changed market prices, poor labour supply, increasingly unpredictable weather, and the Skeldon factory millstone around its neck. Whereas in 1990, the corporation had access to a relatively high-priced preferential market, the PPP/C has departed the stage with market conditions the worst that have perhaps been seen in the history of sugar here; all the more reason why comprehensive restructuring during the 23 years of PPP/C governance was imperative. The PPP’s history will now be saddled with the ironic burden that under its stewardship, the industry, whose workers gave the party its raison d’être, an intrinsic bond with the working class and political currency has been left hanging perilously.”
During her presentation, Shadow Minister of Finance Juretha Fernandes noted that in 2019 the foreign earnings from the sugar industry were US$27.7 million, while in 2023 the foreign earnings stood at US$24.9 million, US$2.9 million dollars less under the PPP than in 2019 under the Coalition government. The PPP government has pumped over $40 billion dollars into sugar since being installed into office August 2, 2020. The Minister in the Office of the President with Responsibility for Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh, told the National Assembly during the delivery of Budget 2024 that “the sugar-growing sector is estimated to have grown by 28 percent in 2023. GUYSUCO produced 60,204 tonnes [of sugar] in 2023.”
