LISTEN CAREFULLY MR DASILVA:
1) I am the product of a canecutter family. My dad worked all his life in the sugar industry. The sugar industry is a brutal labor-intensive industry which pays sugar workers pittances for their hard labor. Workers get up at 4AM, sometimes getting home at 7PM. Unless this system is mechanized, it will tie the workers (mostly Indians) to the industry as slaves and make them chattels.
2) Sugar workers deserve better, like working a regular job, in an air conditioned office, etc, like others. More importantly, they need to be educated and brought into the modern world. Sugar is not going to do this for them. In places like Brazil and Trinidad, more so, diversification was the way to go. Trinidad had given the workers the land so they can make something of themselves.
3) Yes, the PPP did use the workers as a vote bank. They never wanted to consider any other plan except pumping money into the Skeldon estate and blaming lower productivity and world marker prices for a failure of the industry. It does not matter at this stage who says what, PPP or coalition. We need to fix this problem. CLOSING OR DIVERSIFICATION HAS TO BE SERIOUSLY EXPLORED.
4) Raj Singh should not have been imported to head the industry. He lives in New Jersey and was in charge of the ACG (PPP group) there. He is a very close friend of Donald Ramotar, who recruited him into this position. I know this for a fact.
5) People like you, with your partisan view, make it difficult to find a solution to this problem. You need to have an open mind....lets start by admitting that the industry is a failing one in Guyana...and lets not call people names like "nemakharams" and make this a political issue, more than it already has been.