I hope this financial crisis was not made to sell off Guysuco to rich capitalists.

The company needs to diversify into areas were products are needed. 

For example; they can get into fish farming then get  Rainforest Seafoods out of Jamaica (which is owned by a Guyanese) to market and sell the fish around the Caribbean.

There is nothing stopping them from creating another rum company and exporting that bottled rum around the world.

Also they can give the workers a 30% percent stake in the corporation. 

There are several ways out of this financial crisis but it cannot be from just growing cane and making sugar alone.

god rev don't give them more ideas they already thief the sugar industries dry

Well you measured it the last time we had a fling so I am sorry it did not measure up to your standard.

plan to come out for the new year

Rev

That is why I have been calling for the privatization of Guysuco. There will always be fat cats at the top of any state entity. It happens in all countries. Raj Singh is unqualified to run the industry.  Heads of state entities must be non political.

The PPP must dump him before privatizing Guysuco.  This will send a message to all fat cats.

Did they teach you communism in Howard?  But then again you switched allegiance to the PNC who were the ones that created Guysuco, however you are placed in a quandry as their leader Granger advocates the privatization of sugar. 

The strength of government is to govern, not to run business.

Why Government Can't Run a Business

Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits.

By

John Steele Gordon

Updated May 21, 2009 12:01 a.m. ET

The Obama administration is bent on becoming a major player in -- if not taking over entirely -- America's health-care, automobile and banking industries. Before that happens, it might be a good idea to look at the government's track record in running economic enterprises. It is terrible.

In 1913, for instance, thinking it was being overcharged by the steel companies for armor plate for warships, the federal government decided to build its own plant. It estimated that a plant with a 10,000-ton annual capacity could produce armor plate for only 70% of what the steel companies charged.

When the plant was finally finished, however -- three years after World War I had ended -- it was millions over budget and able to produce armor plate only at twice what the steel companies charged. It produced one batch and then shut down, never to reopen.

Or take Medicare. Other than the source of its premiums, Medicare is no different, economically, than a regular health-insurance company. But unlike, say, UnitedHealthcare, it is a bureaucracy-beclotted nightmare, riven with waste and fraud. Last year the Government Accountability Office estimated that no less than one-third of all Medicare disbursements for durable medical equipment, such as wheelchairs and hospital beds, were improper or fraudulent. Medicare was so lax in its oversight that it was approving orthopedic shoes for amputees.

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. There are a number of reasons why this is inherently so. Among them are:

1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. Politicians can only make political decisions, not economic ones. They are, after all, first and foremost in the re-election business. Because of the need to be re-elected, politicians are always likely to have a short-term bias. What looks good right now is more important to politicians than long-term consequences even when those consequences can be easily foreseen. The gathering disaster of Social Security has been obvious for years, but politics has prevented needed reforms.

And politicians tend to favor parochial interests over sound economic sense. Consider a thought experiment. There is a national widget crisis and Sen. Wiley Snoot is chairman of the Senate Widget Committee. There are two technologies that are possible solutions to the problem, with Technology A widely thought to be the more promising of the two. But the company that has been developing Technology B is headquartered in Sen. Snoot's state and employs 40,000 workers there. Which technology is Sen. Snoot going to use his vast legislative influence to push?

2) Politicians need headlines. And this means they have a deep need to do something ("Sen. Snoot Moves on Widget Crisis!"), even when doing nothing would be the better option. Markets will always deal efficiently with gluts and shortages, but letting the market work doesn't produce favorable headlines and, indeed, often produces the opposite ("Sen. Snoot Fails to Move on Widget Crisis!").

3) Governments use other people's money. Corporations play with their own money. They are wealth-creating machines in which various people (investors, managers and labor) come together under a defined set of rules in hopes of creating more wealth collectively than they can create separately.

So a labor negotiation in a corporation is a negotiation over how to divide the wealth that is created between stockholders and workers. Each side knows that if they drive too hard a bargain they risk killing the goose that lays golden eggs for both sides. Just ask General Motors and the United Auto Workers.

But when, say, a school board sits down to negotiate with a teachers union or decide how many administrators are needed, the goose is the taxpayer. That's why public-service employees now often have much more generous benefits than their private-sector counterparts. And that's why the New York City public school system had an administrator-to-student ratio 10 times as high as the city's Catholic school system, at least until Mayor Michael Bloomberg (a more than competent businessman before he entered politics) took charge of the system.

4) Government does not tolerate competition. The Obama administration is talking about creating a "public option" that would compete in the health-insurance marketplace with profit-seeking companies. But has a government entity ever competed successfully on a level playing field with private companies? I don't know of one.

5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. But competition is exactly what makes capitalism so successful an economic system. The lack of it has always doomed socialist economies.

When the federal government nationalized the phone system in 1917, justifying it as a wartime measure that would lower costs, it turned it over to the Post Office to run. (The process was called "postalization," a word that should send shivers down the back of any believer in free markets.) But despite the promise of lower prices, practically the first thing the Post Office did when it took over was . . . raise prices.

Cost cutting is alien to the culture of all bureaucracies. Indeed, when cost cutting is inescapable, bureaucracies often make cuts that will produce maximum public inconvenience, generating political pressure to reverse the cuts.

6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. The CEO of a corporation has the power to manage effectively. He decides company policy, organizes the corporate structure, and allocates resources pretty much as he thinks best. The board of directors ordinarily does nothing more than ratify his moves (or, of course, fire him). This allows a company to act quickly when needed.

But American government was designed by the Founding Fathers to be inefficient, and inefficient it most certainly is. The president is the government's CEO, but except for trivial matters he can't do anything without the permission of two separate, very large committees (the House and Senate) whose members have their own political agendas. Government always has many cooks, which is why the government's broth is so often spoiled.

7) Government is regulated by government.When "postalization" of the nation's phone system appeared imminent in 1917, Theodore Vail, the president of AT&T, admitted that his company was, effectively, a monopoly. But he noted that "all monopolies should be regulated. Government ownership would be an unregulated monopoly."

It is government's job to make and enforce the rules that allow a civilized society to flourish. But it has a dismal record of regulating itself. Imagine, for instance, if a corporation, seeking to make its bottom line look better, transferred employee contributions from the company pension fund to its own accounts, replaced the money with general obligation corporate bonds, and called the money it expropriated income. We all know what would happen: The company accountants would refuse to certify the books and management would likely -- and rightly -- end up in jail.

But that is exactly what the federal government (which, unlike corporations, decides how to keep its own books) does with Social Security. In the late 1990s, the government was running what it -- and a largely unquestioning Washington press corps -- called budget "surpluses." But the national debt still increased in every single one of those years because the government was borrowing money to create the "surpluses."

Capitalism isn't perfect. Indeed, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous description of democracy, it's the worst economic system except for all the others. But the inescapable fact is that only the profit motive and competition keep enterprises lean, efficient, innovative and customer-oriented.

Mr. Gordon is the author of "An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power" (HarperCollins, 2004).

All this is a ruse to kill off the industry. Rev/Yuji/etc will buy at rock bottom price.

JB the ppp will never privatize the sugar industries it will be like cutting their own throat  all those ppp supporters on the forum that is talking about privatization is trying to please they concision its hard still trying to back a government that main objective is only to steal 

The PPP has killed the sugar industry through their mismanagement, incompetence and tiefin. 

They taught me to identify idiots and you are that profile to a "T".  This government's failure is total so that they fail in this industry is not unexpected. That you salvage every pitiful excuse for these crooks is also not unexpected.

Good title for our own GNI book.

"Da Goads, profile of an idiot"

Here are some reviews we may find

"I am grateful for GNI writers and their book, "Da Goads, profile of an idiot" for bringing alive such dull experiences."

"Congrats are in order to the wonderful writers of this book,I'm proud to have this book on my bookshelf."

Inbred at that.

You were not taught properly in Howard as we see time and time again you rely on perception rather than facts to back up your claims. You and your cabal ran away from the corruption debates on public tv because you were getting blows from govt on your lies. Did you even bother to read the article I posted showing why govt should not run business? Of course your Howard education is below this capability. I know you have limited mental prowess so I extracted the main points from the article to dumb it down to your Howard level.

Why Government Can't Run a Business

Politicians need headlines. Executives need profits.

 

These examples are not aberrations; they are typical of how governments run enterprises. 

1) Governments are run by politicians, not businessmen. 

2) Politicians need headlines. 

3) Governments use other people's money.

4) Government does not tolerate competition.

5) Government enterprises are almost always monopolies and thus do not face competition at all. 

6) Successful corporations are run by benevolent despots. 

7) Government is regulated by government.

So they killed the sugar industry so they can sell the assets to their friends.

Assets --- that's a hell of a lot of land, plant and equipment there, JB.

Valuation methods of accounting will tell us if the industry is doing badly asset values are cheap. Whose incentive to have asset values cheap? Mr Nehru/Rev/Yuji/BGurd_See, Mr D_G, Mr Balgobin are sent here preaching privatisation. How convenient. 

Dont waste time with that fool. He went trolling for a response across the net and opted to steal it from here and reuse it with a few minor modifications to the subject to suit our argument

The Chinese corporate leaders will not agree with Mr BGurd_see.

President Ramotar served for 20 years on the Guysuco board. He is part and parcel of the failure of this industry. 

GuySuCo in deep financial crisis

January 1, 2014 | By chris | Filed Under News 

President Donald Ramotar

- owes creditors $10.5B

“No turnaround unless industry fixes agri problems” – GAWU warns

Government, this year, will be scrambling to find solutions for the country’s sugar industry as production fell to an embarrassing 23-year low in 2013.
Production at the eight estates in Berbice and Demerara closed on December 21, the last day of grinding, at a dismal 186,807 tonnes. This was below the 190,000-tonne figure that had been targeted and which had been revised again and again from the original 260,000 tonnes at the beginning of the year. The situation has now left the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) owing banks and suppliers in excess of $10.5B, union officials confirmed yesterday.

Last month, the National Assembly approved a $4B bailout to help pay its 16,000-plus workers and meet other critical expenditure.

However, according to Seepaul Narine, General Secretary of the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU), the largest sugar workers’ union, the $4B will not be enough.

Agriculture Minister, Dr. Leslie Ramsammy

Once the ‘sweet king’, earning the hog’s share of foreign exchange, sugar has slid to third, behind gold and rice.

Already, the Corporation is facing the squeeze from its suppliers, with a number of them refusing to extend more credit. Hard-hit are supplies of spares and fertilizers.

Insiders have been blaming GuySuCo’s agriculture and technical problems, at especially its flagship Skeldon factory, as the biggest contributor to the decline of the industry.

Almost $200M has been spent to build the new factory in East Berbice and develop new lands to accommodate mechanical harvesting.
Kaieteur News was told that a cash-strapped GuySuCo took the decision to reduce its fertilizer quantity on the canes and is now paying the price with lower-than-expected yields.
The Skeldon factory itself remains a major problem. While it had targeted 43,482 tonnes at the beginning of the year, actual production at December 21 was a miserly 25,380 tonnes.

The problems at the factory have been known since being commissioned in August 2009, more than four years ago. A key punt dumper, critical to taking the canes from the waterways into the factory’s conveyor systems, has been malfunctioning. So too had other areas in the factory.
Several faults have been fixed by the Chinese contractor, but with the defects liability period over, GuySuCo had turned to South Africa’s Bosch Engineering this year to help address some of the issues.
With more than US$8M ($1.6B) reportedly being spent on Bosch, GuySuCo and union officials have admitted that the remedial works have not gone so well. Workers are now attempting to fix those “repairs”.

GAWU General Secretary, Seepaul Narine

Yesterday, Narine called for a collective effort in solving what is now turning out to be crisis.

“We are saying to management and workers that the industry is at a crucial stage. It calls for understanding and cooperation between management and workers.”

GuySuCo has been blaming poor weather, strikes and workers’ absence as the biggest factors in the slide. Turnout has on average been below 50% and has been that way for the last few years. Workers have been finding a more permanent fixture in the construction and mining fields.
“Yes, labour remains a big issue. They (GuySuCo) have been using the bell loaders and mechanical harvesters. But this is still not enough.”
GuySuCo’s report of 2012 has told an alarming story. Factories stood idle most of the time.

GuySuCo, to meet its European quota of 190,000 tonnes, has been sacrificing its packaging arm at Enmore. However, the European quota is not likely to pose such a big issue, as under the agreement, the year runs from October to September, union officials said yesterday.
It is still not clear whether Guyana will be importing sugar to meet local demand.

While GuySuCo has been saying technical problems have forced tonnes of cane to be carried over to the new year for the new crop, union officials yesterday claimed that in an effort to meet the 190,000-tonne target in December, young canes were cut. “So we were actually cutting young canes,” a GuySuCo official admitted yesterday.

GuySuCo closed the year owing creditors around $10.5B, GAWU has said.

 

The industry has been an embarrassing one for the Government with problems carried over from the Bharrat Jagdeo administration to the Donald Ramotar government.

Despite a promise to revamp the Board of Directors, there have not been any significant moves.

This year, industry officials say that GuySuCo is mulling a 260,000-tonne target but this also seems a little too high.

The Opposition has criticized Government on what seemed to be a reluctance to take action, despite the poor run of performance of GuySuCo.
Last month, the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP) expressed worry over the industry, calling on “all stakeholders to redouble their efforts to turn things around. Sugar is still the largest employer of labour and any further decline in production could have disastrous effects on the livelihood and wellbeing of sugar workers and their families.”

The Alliance For Change has called for the immediate sacking of the entire GuySuCo board and replacing of management.

Last month, after days of strike action, GuySuCo agreed to pay its workers their annual production incentive. This will be done in two parts, during the first quarter of this year. The Opposition, during the 2013 National Budget debate, had demanded an updated recovery plan for GuySuCo to be laid in the National Assembly.

Sugar has to work - says Nagamootoo.

Sugar is in real trouble today.  This will be a long road.

Glad that this was reactivated because the Indo KKK will pretend as if Guysuco had no problems until May 12, 2015.

.

Why is abbreviation such long word ?

The rice industry has grown with tremendous leaps and gold production has increased.  That is why it appears that sugar has lost it's glamour.

I heard an AFC member said that the Government does not have what it takes to bring back sugar unless they can pump $20 billion into it.

Suh it doan have anything to do with the factory yuh bai choose over the more capable Indian company?