In last Sunday's article I had started to identify the major factors associated with the decline of the regional sugar industry over the past four decades. I had indicated in the article that perhaps the most important association of all might well be the one between the pattern of the decline, which had emerged, and the changing pattern of ownership and management regimes in the region during this period. This week's article continues this examination.
Its primary purpose is to show the effect of these developments on the current cost of producing sugar within the region, which will be the focus of next week's article.
Another important contributory factor to the overall decline has been the deterioration in the productivity of sugar lands and the workforce alongside the reduced efficiency of the sugar factories that process the sugar cane. Since the decline in sugar output has exceeded the de-cline in the acreage of harvested cane, the productivity of sugar lands has clearly declined. Estimates are that, on average, the yield of sugar cane per acre of cultivated land has declined by about one-quarter since its peak in the mid-1960s. Similarly, the yield of sugar (derived from the plant) per acre of cultivated land has declined substantially - by about one-third. Contributing to the decline in the yield of sugar per acre of land has been the reduced efficiency of the factories, which process the sugar-cane plant to produce raw sugar. Thus although the total number of sugar factories in the region has been reduced from 55 to 23 in the search for increased factory efficiency, on average, over the same period, it now requires one-sixth (or 17 per cent) more tons of the sugar plant to produce a ton of sugar.
By any standards the factories are operating at less than acceptable levels of efficiency.
This has reduced the industry's capacity to complete harvesting and processing within reasonable cropping periods. Indeed it has been estimated that the cropping periods are as much as 30 per cent longer than what are required for efficient mill operations!
Labour and thedecline of sugar production
Labour is a major element in the efficient production of sugar. Indeed labour cost is more often than not the largest single expense item in the industry. Over the years at least six developments have aggravated the labour situation in the industry. First, the industry has been consistently failing to attract new entrants and everywhere the workforce has become 'aged.' Indeed the shortage is so acute that, in some of the islands, labour has had to be imported at crop time. This arrangement has benefited Guyanese sugar workers in particular.
Second, the work environment has deteriorated, for a number of reasons. Thus, where the industries were nationalised government interference has produced conflicts in which the political allegiance of the work force became a crucial indicator of how these conflicts would be played out in practice. A good example of this is to be found right here in Guyana. While it was the PNC government which had nationalised the sugar industry, its workforce bore overwhelming allegiance to the then opposition PPP.
Not surprisingly the result was an intensification of conflict to the point where strikes, lock-outs, illegal cane fines, and other forms of industrial sabotage were the norm. Overall, these developments consolidated a pattern of industrial relations practice, which not only sustained the cycle of conflict in the industry, but also by its very nature placed productivity and efficiency in a secondary position in relation to workers' rights, justice and equality.
Over this period, workforce training also lagged. Additionally, the pull of external migration was immense and skilled factory workers were in high demand and therefore migrated when the opportunity occurred. At the same time, particularly in sugar-producing countries other than Guyana, economic diversification was advancing rapidly. New service industries like tourism, entertainment, and travel claimed the cadre of persons that would have formerly gone into the sugar industry where wages and working conditions had remained stagnant by comparison. Land and the decline of sugar
If labour has been a crucial factor in the decline of the industry, so too has been land and land-related issues. Many analyses and reports over the years have detailed the deteriorating husbandry in the region, with particular emphasis on poor ratooning and replanting practices, inadequate fertilizer use, and a host of mis-steps in both cultivation and reaping practices.
To these can be added two other adverse factors. One is considerable evidence of decline in the quality of sugar-cane varieties that were planted. And the other is the significant ravaging crops have suffered over the years, as a result of pests and diseases.
Another aspect of the land problem is that severe physical shortages of land in the territories other than Belize and Guyana have created intense competition for cane lands. Given the returns from sugar, sugar lands have been alienated for housing, recreation and tourism.
In several countries, it is only land use planning regulations that have saved sugar lands from complete alienation. Property developers, especially in Barbados where as we noted the private plantations are owned locally, this threat of conversion of sugar-cane lands to other uses is always present.
In Guyana, although land is far less scarce physically, bringing it into cultivation requires massive investments in such overheads as access roads, drainage, and irrigation. Over the years, due to poor maintenance and insufficient new investments, these have all deteriorated and have also contributed significantly to the decline of the industry.