Minister of Agriculture, Zulfikar Mustapha, said in a meeting on Thursday that the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) can explore several possibilities for its plans to revive the sugar industry, including producing white sugar and exporting to the Caribbean market and distilleries.
GuySuCo Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Sasenarine Singh, added that ethanol production and agro-energy are also being considered.
The CEO also said, “GuySuCo has to move up the value chain to sugar-related value-added products. The days of raw, brown sugar [are] going to be a challenge; we have to move to other products.”
Singh said the goal is to diversify GuySuCo to be successful and make the company more efficient.
He also spoke of the important social role GuySuCo plays by putting around $4 billion into the economy through drainage and irrigation services across rural Demerara and Berbice.
The CEO told farmers that a lot of work is being done to fix human resources and leadership challenges at the factories to “find out what is going wrong so we can refit it and make it better.
The Government of Guyana had allocated a total of $5 billion to revive the sugar industry in the Emergency Budget 2020 but the company currently does not have any cash.
CEO Singh addressed this saying, “I want to make this absolutely clear, there is no excess cash in GuySuCo today. In August the Minister caused us to get $600 million from the Government to pay salaries, this is how difficult it is.”
The CEO added that they were “starting from zero” on some of the estates but he is optimistic about the Enmore Packing plant which is packaging sugar for the local market at a profit.
When the sugar estates were closed, the company’s assets were transferred to the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL). Minister Mustapha said that the assets would eventually be returned to GuySuCo.
