HEAD of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr. Roger Luncheon says it is abundantly clear the Aroaima Bauxite Company (ABC) wants to know in the shortest possible timeframe the Government's definitive position on the future of its operations here.

According to Luncheon, the U.S-based Alcoa firm which owns the ABC had made it pellucidly clear that it will be "closing shop" and moving on if a decision is not made in the shortest possible time.

Luncheon told a news conference on Tuesday afternoon that Prime Minister Sam Hinds briefed Cabinet at a meeting earlier in the day on the more recent developments regarding the bauxite operations in the Berbice River where the ABC operates.

According to him, it was Cabinet's concern that the extremely short timeframe provided to the Government for a definitive position calls for the various stakeholders, individually and collectively, to recognise the seriousness and predicament of all concerned in the Berbice River area.

He said Cabinet feels they should work with the administration to arrive at a solution that seeks to maintain an industry that will reserve as many jobs as possible in that location.

Luncheon said too, that it is quite clear that most, if not all of the stakeholders, have arrived at the inescapable conclusion that the ABC will cease to exist at some short point in time.

President Bharrat Jagdeo last week said he was expecting the Joint-Committee on Bauxite, which was set-up by himself and opposition leader Mr. Desmond Hoyte to help in the resuscitation of the ailing industry, to come-up with a solution by this week or give their views on how to proceed speedily on a controversial proposal made by Alcoa.

Alcoa made the proposal sometime ago about consolidating the Berbice Mining Enterprises (Bermine) operations in the Berbice River, which the Government has initially accepted.

The proposal called for, among other things, the closure of Bermine's Everton operations and the merging of its Aroaima operations, which it runs jointly with the Government, with operations at Kwakwani.

This proposal has, however, been heavily criticised by the Bermine workers and the opposition parties and paved the way for the setting up of the joint-committee.

"I warned at that time (when the committee was set up) that we should not delay things. The situation is very, very tense and it's not as easy because what we are talking about is risking the jobs of all those workers in the Berbice River," the President said last week.

"Whilst all of these proposals come up from the unions, etcetera...we have to assess them, we have to make sure that they are realistic.

"The situation, I gathered, has gone even worse and I hope that if it deteriorates that the same people who were saying that they had all the wonderful solutions to the problem of bauxite mining in Berbice... will not run away now," he said.

"They will have to take the blame squarely now because we wanted to move ahead and we said that if we had gone with that option in the beginning it may have caused some reduction (and some social problems). But at least we would have been able to consolidate bauxite production at a lower level without it affecting the treasury," he added.

"I expect that the committee that was set up will give us their view on how to proceed speedily because the company now, something that I warned about,...wants to know by (this) week whether they should start winding-up operations.

"And that committee, some of whose members seem to have all the answers and ...think we are sitting on a gold mine...,I hope, will advise us now on how to proceed on this matter because we are already giving about $1Bln in subsidy to (Linden Mining Enterprises) (and) we can't handle more subsidies to the bauxite industry," President Jagdeo said.

The President and Hoyte asked the committee to review the Alcoa proposal and others put by a Bermine Employees Group.

Efforts to get a comment from the committee were futile.

According to Luncheon, the Prime Minister reported to Cabinet yesterday that the company's views related to difficulties that they experience in market share, in maintaining that market share and perhaps more importantly, in competing by producing bauxite at a competitive cost.

"It was the company's concern that they were unable to produce bauxite at a cost that would guarantee the maintenance of their market share," Luncheon pointed out.