I am not saying that GuySuCo is in better hands today, but it could not be worse

Nov 22, 2024 Letters

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Dear Editor

I was going to respond to the letter from former CEO of GuySuCo Sasenarine Singh published in the Stabroek News on November 17^th 2024, captioned “Incoming gov’t found that over G$60b in GuySuCo assets were lost between 2017 and 2020” which to my mind was riddled with much fiction and untruths.

And I had even started to do the research to repudiate most of what he had stated, when on the 19^th there appeared a letter from one Raj Parmanand captioned “Monies spent to reopen Rose Hall estate would have been better spent to resuscitate and expand Albion’s” all who are interested in GuySuCo and its current travails should read the letter from Raj. I have to state that I don’t know him, but his very comprehensive understanding of the inner workings of GuySuCo is very insightful.

I especially want to emphasise that in less then one year after being appointed as CEO and assembling that group of experts he has named, at the same time that this man was spending billions to resurrect a dead white elephant at Rose Hall, Albion estate entered the 2021 wet season by not securing the back of the cultivation from the rising Canje Creek which was normal practice in the past. And since Albion is an estate which is completely drained by 11 huge 3 ft diameter pumps, 5 were not working, these lapses flooded and decimated most of the Albion cultivation. The industry has not recovered even today.

There was only one addition I would like to make, and it is about the GuySuCo strategy paper. In 2021 at a meeting at the office of the President we, Board and Staff members of GuySuCo, were instructed by the president to remap GuySuCo’s strategy to show the corporation going down a new path which can lead it to viability. When it became clear that the CEO had already drafted a strategy without consulting his board, he was instructed to go back and with the full participation of his board, draft a set of strategies which can guide GuySuCo going forward to profitability. It has been the problem all along, this man refuses to be guided by his board, anyway as per instructions from the president, in a series of meetings, I as chairman of the Operations sub-committee at 8 or ten very comprehensive meetings, came up with the strategy. Summarised as follows.

1. Less Bulk sugar production for that low income per tonne, and much more aggressive packaging and bagging, since according to the Treaty of Chaguaramas once we were packaging and bagging our sugar other Caricom members were obligated to buy it. We also summarised what had to be done to enhance the local bagging and packaging capabilities.
2. Diversification was a major option, and I produced an analysis to show that if Uitvlught our worse producing cane quality estate, could produce ethanol directly from the sugar cane juice, it could earn double the amount it was earning from sugar. I still hold this view, not only for Uitvlught but the other estates as well since our Tons of Cane to make a Ton of Sugar, TC/TS, is nearly double compared to other countries. But the research told us that one ton of sugar always gives approximately 20 gallons of ethanol. Most people I speak to don’t realise that you don’t have to make molasses to make alcohol, you can make a lot more by just fermenting the cane juice directly, and since our very high TC/TS makes us uncompetitive, taking almost double the cane to make one ton of sugar than our competitors, then making ethanol makes us a better competitor.

For example, internationally one ton of sugar cane at 7-9 TC/TS produces 120 kg of 96 % sucrose sugar, but only 38 kg molasses with less than 5% sucrose sugar. Our best diversification should include aquaculture, but Guyanese seem to have this marriage with sugar and refuse to get a divorce, so we left it out.

3. We decided to recommend making white sugar at Albion and package and bag it for the Caribbean. In going through the Budget item by item we saw some opportunities to do some extra trimming e.g. 4. Stop using the bell loader as inefficient, use long boom loaders to load the cane mechanically instead 5. Increase mechanization by putting in a more friendly field layout for our climate, the answers for Guyana doesn’t lie in Cuba or India it lies in Louisianna, USA which is producing 4 million tons of sugar per annum from similar low lying, swampy, high rainfall conditions like ours in a 100 day per year cropping season. 6. Introduce drones to apply Agro chemicals including ripeners and stop the very expensive aircraft costs.

For ethanol I a non-executive Director, without pay, went to the Brazilian embassy and they gave me the names of 40-50 original manufacturers for sugar cane equipment in Brazil, I went through the entire list of emails and researched what they produced, and selected 4 companies which produced distillery components, then I emailed them and invited them to inform us how much a distillery would cost, using the parameters which GuySuCo factory people had given me, steam pressure, amount of cane etc. at the end of the process, which took several months, it became clear that the very comprehensive projected cost supplied from Bosch International in Brazil for the Uitvlught distillery, would be around 4.5 million US, I estimated that the cost recovery would be very feasible and recommended it. I’m not sure what ensued.

I am not aware that any part of the strategy recommends reopening anything. We did recommend no further action at Skeldon since it would cost far too much. The recommendations for the East demerara estates included making a map of the abandoned cultivation, showing in different colors for agriculture, housing, industrial etc. to earn income from it. We never recommended the entire area be used for housing. Its why I wasted one and a half years doing an aquaculture feasibility study, for 1000 acres of aquaculture on the lower East Coast to employ 4000 people.

Apparently, the strategy was not presented to the government, I never understood why it was delayed, but around this time I, having contracted Covid 19 and hospitalized at Liliendaal for 11 days, and was really sick afterwards for months being over 70. So further meetings were held but without any significant change to the overall strategy.

I am not saying that GuySuCo is in better hands today, but it could not be worse. I see a lot of Is here, but as chairman of the Operations field and factory sub-committee, I began to see, not a path to sunshine in that tunnel, but one to less darkness. The GuySuCo Board needs quite a bit of pruning, since there is substantial conflict of interest on that board, and there were only two members of the board who worked in the sugar Industry, Mr. Jairam Petam and myself.

Regards

Tony Vieira

 

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• “Incoming gov’t, expand Albion’s, GUYSUCO, Raj Parmanand, Sasenarine Singh

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