Jul 02, 2017 Source
The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) should come out and explain to sugar workers what it did with more than $348B in European Union (EU) funding it received between 2006-2013.
The amount of money disbursed by the European Union was announced last week by EU ambassador, Jernej Videtic, who also said it is unlikely at this time that the bloc would consider more support for the troubled industry.
The money was supposed to have been plugged into projects that would make the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) more competitive as well as be able to explore diversification.However, the industry is in dire straits. Its fortunes have steadily declined over the last two decades with cost of production now said to be three times the world market price.
Wales estate was closed by the administration last December and two more – Rose Hall and Enmore – are likely to face the same fate.The administration has made it clear that the 17,000-strong workers industry is placing a massive strain on the rest of the economy.On Friday, asked what his administration would have done with $348B in EU grants, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon said that it is clear that if the money was spent in the sugar industry, Guyana would not be facing the situation of having to bail out GuySuCo to the tune of billions of dollars annually.“This is a huge sum of money that clearly did not go where it was needed.”Harmon, speaking during the post-Cabinet briefings at the Ministry of the Presidency, noted
that the Leader of the Opposition, Bharrat Jagdeo, under whose watch the slide of GuySuCo continued, has been calling for a number of inquiries with regards to this administration.If there was ever an inquiry in the EU billions, Harmon said, “You will find the bulk of the money never went where it was supposed to. And so when the PPP and some of their friends are going to sugar workers and crying out ‘we sorry for you, we sorry for you,’ and so on, they should explain what it is that they did with all this money.”
Specifically, Harmon said, the PPP should be made to answer why it is that the state-owned industry is producing sugar higher than the world market price.
“This is not something that could have happened overnight. It did not start in 2015 (when we entered office). These were noted trends that happened along the way.
“And so when we came into office, the decisions that the PPP government were afraid to take, we took those decisions for the interest of the industry and the people of the country.”
The Minister said that the Coalition Government is attempting to save it.
“The PPP, they were on a path of killing it and this is what I want to say, that we are working in the interest of the people in the sugar industry and that we are working in the interest to ensure that there is still a sugar industry going forward in Guyana…albeit in a different stage.”
GuySuCo has more than $75B in debts and was forced to close the US$200M Skeldon factory for the first crop after technical problems surfaced.Annual production is expected to be low again this year.Jagdeo, who ended his two constitutional terms in 2011, had insisted that the Skeldon project was the answer for the industry.EU officials last week said that the disbursements were never based on how much sugar was produced, but rather, on indicators measuring reforms, which Guyana passed.
Guyana was among more than 18 countries, including Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and St. Kitts and Nevis, that benefitted from the Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol countries (AMSP) to support a number of African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries that were adjusting to the 2006 reform of the EU’s sugar regime.
That year saw the implementation of a devastating 36 percent phased price cut for countries that sold sugar to the EU.There have been several protests, organized by the Opposition-aligned unions in recent weeks, over the closure of estates.Government insists that it cannot continue to spend billions of dollars annually to bail the industry out.