Latest update March 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Aug 03, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Ruling politicians dominate every aspect of life in a nation. A politician can send a country to war and that could mark the end of that state as a viable territory. A politician can decide which industry must close and the economic consequences can be disastrous. Countless citizens of this country across political and racial lines have moaned the loss of the railway. It was a decision of the Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham.
There is no biography of Burnham so we are yet to read a detailed explanation as to why Burnham made that decision. The definitive study of Burnham in power is Tyrone Ferguson’s “To Survive Sensibly or to Court Heroic Death: Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965- 1985.”
This is a competent and superb research effort and remains a gem in Guyana’s historiography because it remains the only book on Burnham’s reign. Ferguson did not offer reason for the scrapping of the railway.
Politicians are humans just like the lay person in that they have weak points and line faults in their personality. Is it possible that Burnham experienced a bad incident on the railway when he was a boy and he decided to get rid of it now that he was Prime Minister? Things like these shape the policies of rulers when they come to power. The most luminous example is Hitler. Looking back, we can safely say that the abolition of the railway was a huge mistake.
Bharrat Jagdeo had an ocean of research material to draw upon when he took the decision to build the Skeldon sugar factory. It was a tragic mistake. Sugar had become the nemesis of small Caribbean countries as globalization smothered the economies of poor Third World countries. It was Jagdeo and Jagdeo alone when as President argued that the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU would undermine the CSME thus making Caricom states poorer in a globalized world where small economies could not compete with large, industrial countries.
The Skeldon factory is the largest investment in Guyanese history and it is a failure and will be a failure because sugar as a big foreign exchange earner for Guyana is dead. Globalization has killed it. Guyana has not moved out of its economic mode since George Beckford wrote in 1972, his seminal work; “Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World,”
Guyana under Jagdeo embraced all the pitfalls of what Beckford described. Forbes Burnham had the erudition to see the sense in Beckford’s work and tried to move away from monoculture. Monoculture survived and thrived under Jagdeo.
The essential argument of Third World radical economists is that with both inferior technology and manufacturing ability, poor Third World states cannot compete with super-rich industrial countries. It was only Guyana that stayed with sugar as the Caricom states diversified.
Unless Jagdeo writes his memoirs and is honest in it, we will continue to guess why he went with Skeldon when the curtains were coming down on Caribbean sugar.
There are four reasons why sugar was dying and Jagdeo should have exited the industry. First we cannot in the foreseeable future compete with countries whose sugar industries are technologically driven making then more competitive than Guyana’s. Even in family owned sugar business in Florida, cost of production is lower than in Guyana.
Secondly, global use of sugar from cane has been substantially reduced the past twenty years because of alternatives. Chocolate and soda are using sweeteners other than sugar from cane. Many sweetened products use corn syrup. In fact, many of the world top brands in soda do not carry cane sugar.
Thirdly, Governments in the industrialized world are constantly warning their citizens to reduce intake of calories to prevent the onset of weight. President Obama’s wife is in the forefront of this campaign. Fourthly as the Tate and Lyle personnel told the Guysuco Commission of Inquiry, European countries have replaced cane sugar with beet sugar. Guyana’s sugar into the European market is quickly coming to an end.
Professor Clive Thomas, the Chairman of Guysuco, sees the survival of cane sugar through the Caricom markets. Even if that is so, Guysuco will not be the large industry vital to Guyana’s economy as it was in the immediate post-colonial years. If Guysuco will survive through Caricom markets, the foreign exchange earning will not be so exciting. The harsh reality is that the reign of sugar in the West Indies has gone the way of Test cricket in the West Indies – gone for channa (to use local lingo)
Listen to the man that is throwing Guyanese bright future away
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