Recently, the print media was dominated by letters and commentaries on sugar production under the PPP/C Government post-2020. Of interest, one letter written on May 16, 2025, contends that:
“The PPP/C government will come and tell the people of this country during this year’s elections campaign that the sugar industry produced poorly in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 because the APNU+AFC government closed sugar estates during the reorganization of the sugar industry. However, the question must be asked, how is it that despite the reorganization process, the industry still produced two to three times more sugar from 2016 to 2020, earned over US$200M more and with less resources?
Well, it is always very easy to destroy things, but very difficult, costly, and time-consuming to build and rebuild things. Before I demonstrate with statistical facts, it would be remiss of me not to remind readers and the critics that the APNU+AFC government had completely disregarded its own advice not to close any of the sugar estates, vis-à-vis, the Commission of Inquiry (COI) report on the sugar industry.
Now for the facts. The APNU+AFC government closed four (4) sugar estates, namely: Skeldon, Rose Hall, Enmore and Wales. When the PPP/C government resumed office in 2020, work began to reopen only two of those estates: Rose Hall and Skeldon.
As of 2022, according to the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) annual report, the reopened estates were not yet accounting for total production, which is understandable. It took a considerable amount of time and resources to put back those estates into production. It was not an easy task then, and it is still not an easy task now.
As shown in Table 1, the total hectares (ha) harvested was 42,784, which generated 206,618 metric tons (MT) of sugar, with an average yield/ha of 4.8 mt in 2015. Conversely, as of 2022, a total of 15 686 ha were harvested, which generated a total of 47,049 mt of sugar, with an average yield/ha of 3 mt.
In other words, in 2022, almost three times (3x) less sugar cane was harvested, and 4.4x less sugar was produced owing to a lower average yield per ha.
In 2024, readers would recall that the Government of Guyana (GoG) had reported on the efforts being made to increase production by way of cultivating an additional 5,000+ ha of land through the Skeldon estate.
With this in mind, the hard fact of the matter is that the sugar industry is in this current state, producing 4.4x less sugar than it did in 2015, largely because of the closure of the four estates by the APNU+AFC government in the 2015-2020 period.
And the PPP/C government could have practically reopened only two of those estates. Although work began by the PPP/C government almost immediately to reopen these two estates, Rose Hall and Skeldon, they did not start producing until post-2022/23 in the case of Rose Hall and post-2023/24 in the case of Skeldon.
Yours respectfully,
Joel Bhagwandin
