GuySuCo’s future lies in conversion of its land, water , infrastructure into a diversified agro-industrial platform

Dear Editor, 

President Irfaan Ali has again threatened that “heads will roll” at GuySuCo if production targets are not achieved. The threat has been repeated often enough to acquire the quality of ritual rather than accountability. Management is admonished, targets are announced, billions are injected, production disappoints, another explanation is supplied, and the cycle recommences. The President now appears determined to bully managers into manufacturing bread from field stones, as though volume, viability and profitability can be summoned by executive displeasure from an economic structure whose foundational arithmetic no longer works. Threatening to dismiss GuySuCo’s leadership may satisfy the political appetite for spectacle, but it does not alter soil conditions, rehabilitate exhausted lands, repair decrepit factories, reverse chronic labour shortages, restore the European preferential market, reduce input costs, improve cane quality, create export markets or transform an uncompetitive commodity into a commercially viable product. A President may dismiss a chief executive officer; he cannot dismiss economic reality. He may command an estate to produce more tonnes; he cannot command the market to pay more than the sugar is worth, nor can he decree that the full cost of producing it should cease to exceed the revenue derived from selling it. 

Performance, production and public financing 

The President’s rhetoric also obscures an elementary principle of performance management: output cannot be evaluated independently of the resources consumed to produce it. A numerical increase in tonnage is not, by itself, evidence of improvement. If the cost of generating that additional output rises faster than the value of the output itself, the apparent improvement is economically fictitious. The relevant barometer is not merely tonnes produced. It is the relationship among public investment, production volume, unit cost, realised revenue, operating loss and the trajectory toward self-sufficiency. 

The pattern is not one of recovery. It is one of severe contraction followed by intermittent and fragile rebounds. Production declined by approximately 35 per cent between 2020 and 2021, fell further in 2022, recovered in 2023, collapsed again in 2024, and improved to 59,600 tonnes in 2025. That 2025 increase of 26.5 per cent has been publicly presented as progress. Yet production remained approximately 29,268 tonnes, or nearly one-third, below the 2020 level. An increase from an exceptionally depressed base is not a turnaround. It is merely a partial recovery from failure. 

The financial record is equally revealing. The Government announced approximately G$7 billion in support in 2020, allocated G$2 billion in 2021, G$6 billion in the 2022 budget, together with a further G$1 billion in supplementary operational support, G$4 billion in 2023 and G$6 billion in 2024. These announced transfers amount to at least G$26 billion between 2020 and 2024, without including all indirect expenditures, guarantees, worker-related payments, infrastructure costs or subsequent support. During that same period, output fell from 88,868 tonnes to 47,109 tonnes, a contraction of approximately 47 per cent. This is the inverse of a viable investment relationship. Capital support increased while production deteriorated. Even where output recovered temporarily, the increase was not shown to have generated a proportionate improvement in cost efficiency, revenue or profitability. In 2025, production rose by approximately 12,491 tonnes over the preceding year, but remained substantially below the 2020 level and GuySuCo still required continuing state support. The 2026 budget has provided another G$8.4 billion, of which the Government has disclosed that approximately 81 per cent will be used for wages and salaries. That may preserve employment, but it does not, by itself, constitute recapitalisation, diversification or commercial transformation. 

The distinction is critical. If the state is financing GuySuCo principally as an employment and social-stability programme, then the Government should classify and defend it transparently as social expenditure. It should not repeatedly present recurrent transfers as investment in a commercial turnaround when the enterprise remains structurally dependent on the Treasury. A genuine investment must produce measurable incremental value. Every additional dollar injected should generate a defensible increase in productive capacity, cost reduction, revenue, market penetration or asset value. Where the additional expenditure merely reproduces the same dependency at a higher cost, the intervention is not investment; it is the financing of institutional inertia. 

Leadership threats and structural failure 

The President’s threats against management therefore confuse proximate administrative failure with fundamental economic failure. GuySuCo certainly requires decisive, technically competent and accountable leadership. But no manager, however gifted, can rescue an enterprise whose governing model is commercially irrational, whose objectives are politically contradictory, whose capital allocation is not tied to enforceable returns, and whose continued existence is evaluated according to political sentiment rather than disciplined economic criteria. Indeed, GuySuCo has had successive leaders, boards, advisers, engineers, foreign specialists and substantial state support. Mr. Sasenarine Singh served as Chief Executive Officer from 2020 until 2024 and was succeeded by Mr. Paul Cheong. The changing of personnel has not changed the structural outcome. That fact should caution against the President’s apparent belief that another round of dismissals will somehow unlock profitability. If repeated replacements of management produce the same result, the probability increases that the principal defect lies not merely in the occupants of the offices, but in the architecture of the enterprise they are being asked to administer. 

The leadership is being required to generate commercially viable output from a model that has long ceased to possess the conditions necessary for viability. It is being ordered to create bread from field stones. The more honest conclusion is that the recipe itself is defective. Before offering an estate to GAWU, the President first threatened to dismiss GuySuCo’s leadership. Neither proposal addresses the central economic question. President Ali’s reported offer to allow the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers’ Union to operate a sugar estate may generate political theatre, but it does not constitute a credible economic, managerial or agro-industrial strategy for rescuing GuySuCo. The proposition appears to reduce the crisis of the sugar industry to one of labour mobilisation and operational responsibility. It is nothing of the sort. GuySuCo’s predicament is a complex crisis of economic architecture, agricultural productivity, soil and land suitability, technological obsolescence, factory reliability, market access, managerial competence, capital allocation, product strategy and political will. 

GAWU represents workers and possesses considerable institutional knowledge of the industry. That does not mean that it commands the capital, agronomic expertise, engineering capability, export-market intelligence, research infrastructure, land-use authority, financial resources or governmental machinery necessary to transform a chronically insolvent state corporation. The Government possesses vastly greater fiscal, technical, diplomatic and administrative resources than the union. If successive governments, supported by billions of dollars in public financing, specialist agencies, international advisers, preferential-market adjustment assistance and the entire apparatus of the state, have failed to restore GuySuCo to sustained viability, upon what rational basis should anyone believe that the union can succeed merely by being handed an estate? The proposal, therefore, risks becoming an exercise in political displacement. If GAWU declines the offer, it may be accused of criticising without accepting responsibility. If it accepts and fails, the Government may seek to transfer blame for a structural calamity created and perpetuated over decades. Neither outcome addresses the central issue. The question is not whether GAWU can supervise workers, plant cane or manage harvesting. The question is whether the traditional GuySuCo model can produce sugar at a cost that bears any commercially defensible relationship to the revenue obtainable from its sale. 

The economic exhaustion of the existing model: 

The uncomfortable answer is increasingly self-evident. Bulk sugar production, in its present configuration, has reached economic exhaustion. This is not an ideological conclusion. It is elementary arithmetic. When the cost of producing a commodity persistently exceeds the income generated from selling it, increasing production can magnify rather than cure the loss. Automation, mechanised harvesting, field conversion and factory rehabilitation may reduce particular operating costs, but they require substantial additional capital expenditure. The relevant issue is therefore not whether mechanisation produces some efficiency. It is whether the savings generated over the useful life of the investment are sufficient to justify the capital cost and close GuySuCo’s enormous competitiveness gap. There is little evidence that mechanisation, by itself, can convert the existing model into a self-sustaining commercial enterprise. Indeed, GuySuCo’s 2024 audited report recorded production of only 47,109 metric tonnes, following similarly weak and volatile performance in preceding years. The corporation continues to depend upon public transfers, and the 2026 national budget allocated another G$8.4 billion, approximately 81 per cent of which is earmarked for wages and salaries. These expenditures may protect incomes temporarily, but income support must not be confused with economic transformation. A subsidy that maintains employment without creating a viable, productive model is social protection financed through a commercial institution. If that is the Government’s policy, it should say so honestly and account for it transparently. 

Guyana should also remember why European adjustment financing was provided after the dismantling of the preferential sugar regime. For decades, Guyana and other African, Caribbean and Pacific producers benefited from guaranteed access to European markets at remunerative prices substantially above ordinary world-market levels. When that protection was withdrawn, affected countries received accompanying assistance to facilitate adjustment, competitiveness, restructuring, economic diversification and the protection of sugar-dependent workers and communities. The purpose was not to subsidise indefinite resistance to economic reality. It was to finance a transition from an obsolete preferential-market model toward a sustainable productive future. Other sugar-producing countries confronted that reality with varying degrees of courage and success. Trinidad and Tobago eventually accepted that Caroni (1975) Limited could not continue in its existing form. Its approximately 9,000 separated workers were offered packages that included residential lots, two-acre agricultural plots and access to training. Former Caroni lands were subsequently directed toward agriculture, housing, industrial development and other productive uses. The implementation was imperfect, bureaucratically delayed and, in some instances, unjustifiably prolonged. Nevertheless, Trinidad recognised that the workers, lands and assets of the sugar industry had to be repositioned rather than indefinitely imprisoned inside a failed commercial structure. 

Mauritius followed another route. It restructured and consolidated its sugar industry while moving beyond bulk raw sugar into refined and speciality sugars, electricity generation, ethanol, alcohol, molasses and other value-added uses of the sugar cane plant. St Kitts and Nevis concluded that export sugar was no longer commercially defensible and developed an adaptation strategy encompassing worker retraining, social protection, tourism, agriculture, enterprise development and alternative land use. Jamaica examined refined sugar, rum-related inputs, ethanol, cogeneration and industrial by-products. Fiji continued supporting cane production, but its experience also demonstrates the danger of preserving an industry through extensive state support without adequately resolving productivity and competitiveness. The consistent international lesson is not that every country must close its sugar industry. It is that no responsible country can evade the choice among restructuring, diversification, value-added transformation, radical consolidation or exit. Guyana has instead subsidised indecision. 

The case for diversification 

The viable future of GuySuCo lies not in sentimental attachment to sugar in its historical form, but in the disciplined conversion of its land, water, infrastructure, labour and institutional assets into a diversified agro-industrial platform. Crop diversification must become the organising principle of that transition, but it cannot be approached through political intuition, casual experimentation or the distribution of land without scientific and commercial support. 

Guyana should convene an international, multidisciplinary conference on the productive transformation of GuySuCo. This must not be another ceremonial gathering at which prepared speeches are delivered and subsequently forgotten. It should be a working scientific and investment conference involving internationally respected specialists in agronomy, soil science, agricultural economics, hydrology, climate resilience, sugar technology, aquaculture, agro-processing, land-use planning, logistics, export marketing and rural development. Expertise should be invited from countries such as Brazil, India, Mauritius, Cuba, Fiji, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and other jurisdictions with direct experience in sugar restructuring, agricultural conversion and value-added production. 

The Government should consider placing a substantial international prize behind this exercise, whether through a competitive research commission, consortium challenge or global call for transformation proposals. A US$1 million research and innovation prize would be insignificant compared with the billions repeatedly transferred to GuySuCo if it attracted a scientifically credible plan capable of identifying the highest-value uses of the corporation’s lands and assets. The winning proposal should not be selected by political appointees alone, but by an independent panel comprising agricultural scientists, economists, engineers, market specialists, worker representatives, private-sector experts and international development professionals. 

Scientific assessment and crop-suitability analysis 

Before that conference, comprehensive soil, salinity, drainage, irrigation, contamination, fertility and land-capability testing should be conducted across GuySuCo’s estates. The conference should then evaluate at least ten commercially plausible crops, together with livestock, aquaculture, agro-processing, renewable-energy and mixed-use development options. Its mandate should be to produce an independently costed, evidence-based and time-bound transformation plan, not another general statement of aspirations. Crop selection must be governed by comparative commercial analysis. It is not enough to establish that a crop can grow on GuySuCo’s lands. The decisive question is whether it can be produced profitably, consistently and at sufficient scale. Each proposed crop should therefore be evaluated according to soil compatibility, salinity tolerance, drainage and irrigation requirements, climate resilience, time to maturity, yield per acre, labour intensity, mechanisation potential, seed and input costs, disease vulnerability, maintenance requirements, harvesting costs, storage life, spoilage rates, domestic demand, export-market access, processing potential, logistics, foreign-exchange earnings, employment generation and risk-adjusted net return per acre. The crop commanding the highest selling price is not necessarily the most profitable. A commodity may attract an impressive market price but require expensive inputs, intensive labour, refrigerated transportation, specialised packaging or rapid delivery. The correct measure is the net commercial return after all costs and risks have been calculated. GuySuCo needs a crop-and-land investment matrix capable of distinguishing between what is agronomically possible and what is economically rational. The transition should combine short-cycle crops capable of producing revenue within weeks or months, medium-term crops yielding returns within one to three years, and long-term tree crops capable of generating sustained higher-value income. Suitable lands should also be assessed for fish and shrimp cultivation, livestock, dairy production, seed development, agro-processing and cold-storage facilities. Cane should not necessarily disappear altogether, but it should survive only where it supports profitable domestic sugar, speciality products, molasses, rum, ethanol, cogeneration or other commercially defensible downstream uses. 

A worker land and agricultural enterprise programme 

A modified Caroni-type land programme should also be considered. Suitable lands could be offered to current and former sugar workers, qualified young farmers and agricultural cooperatives through lease, lease-to-own or structured purchase arrangements. But land alone is not an economic development policy. Each farmer would require serviced and surveyed plots, drainage, irrigation, soil analysis, extension support, approved planting material, machinery services, affordable credit, crop insurance, storage, processing facilities and guaranteed or pre-arranged markets. Otherwise, the state would merely transfer the risk of failure from GuySuCo to economically vulnerable families. 

The political economy of dependency 

There is also a political dimension that must no longer be avoided. The recurring cycle of GuySuCo’s financial deterioration followed by another state rescue allows the PPP/C to present itself repeatedly as the indispensable protector of sugar workers. Whether this dependency is deliberately engineered or merely politically exploited, its effect is similar: workers remain economically vulnerable, the corporation remains institutionally dependent, taxpayers absorb the losses, and governmental intervention is converted into gratitude capable of producing electoral loyalty. Genuine diversification and commercial self-sufficiency would liberate workers from that dependency. The persistence of the present model raises the legitimate question of whether political utility has become more valuable than economic reform. This is not an argument for abandoning sugar workers. On the contrary, it is an argument for respecting them sufficiently to offer more than temporary employment inside a deteriorating institution. Workers deserve secure livelihoods, transferable skills, ownership opportunities, productive land, modern agricultural support and a genuine stake in the new economy. They should not be used as a human justification for preserving indefinitely a structure that repeatedly consumes public resources without achieving measurable sustainability. 

GuySuCo does not need another rhetorical contest between the Government and GAWU. It needs intellectual honesty, scientific investigation, commercial discipline and the political courage to transform. The future does not lie in asking the union to inherit an estate under the same failed conditions. It lies in redesigning the entire enterprise around crop diversification, value-added production, aquaculture, worker farming, agro-processing, appropriate housing development and accountable land use. 

Conclusion: 

The countries that lost European sugar preferences were forced to confront reality. Some restructured. Some diversified. Some exited. Guyana continues to postpone the reckoning. The President should therefore withdraw from political theatrics and convene the national and international expertise required to chart a scientifically defensible transition. GuySuCo’s lands are not dead assets, and its workers are not expendable. What has become indefensible is the continued attempt to preserve an exhausted production model through endless subsidies, improvised management and political nostalgia. 

Yours faithfully, 

Professor Dr Stanley A. V. Paul