Dear Editor,
For decades, GuySuCo has been kept alive through heavy public subsidies. Between 2015 and 2024, taxpayers injected more than $75 billion into the company, including over $7 billion last year alone. Yet sugar output continues to fall—from more than 230,000 tonnes in the early 2000s to around 60,000 tonnes in 2024. No rational policy can justify such recurring losses without restructuring the model itself.
The criticism of allowing a private company to produce white, packaged sugar ignores the economic logic. Guyana needs new investment, new technology, and new value-added products. A private refinery will not compete against GuySuCo; it will complement GuySuCo by expanding white sugar output, creating jobs, stimulating transport and logistics, and supplying both local and regional markets. This is how the wider sugar economy grows.
It is a fiction to argue that private capital and the public interest cannot coexist. Around the world, the most resilient economies rely on partnerships where governments provide regulation and direction, while private firms drive innovation and efficiency. Guyana cannot remain trapped in outdated models where taxpayers endlessly bankroll inefficiency and call it “public good.” Fiscal prudence and public welfare often go hand in hand.
President Irfaan Ali and Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha have both stated the government’s clear goal: “a viable, diversified, and self-sustaining sugar sector.” Mustapha has publicly emphasized that “private investment will complement and strengthen GuySuCo, not replace it.” These statements reflect the reality that the future of sugar lies not in political sentiment but in technical modernization and shared responsibility.
The turnaround of GuySuCo depends on more than nostalgia. It requires investment in co-generation, packaged and brown sugar, and molasses-based value chains—goals that align with existing government strategy. Private participation helps advance these targets faster, without burdening the state with ever-growing subsidies.
In the final analysis, the public good is not undermined when government reduces waste and creates the conditions for profit, productivity, and employment. It is strengthened. The real betrayal would be to ignore the lessons of GuySuCo’s past and continue pretending that state ownership alone guarantees progress.
Guyana’s economic modernization is not about surrendering control—it is about sharing responsibility. Private investment, when properly regulated, is not the enemy of public welfare; it is often its most efficient ally.