Dear Editor,
The recently issued End-of-Year statement by the Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union (GAWU) reads less like a sober assessment of the challenges facing sugar workers in 2025 and more like a carefully polished political communiqué from the Communist Party of Soviet Union, that bears little resemblance to the lived reality within Guyana’s sugar industry.
For a union that claims to champion labour, GAWU’s record over the past decade—including 2025—reflects not resilience and progress, but persistent underperformance, selective narration of facts, and a troubling alignment with political interests that has coincided with the steady weakening of an already fragile sugar industry.
The claim of “improvement in sugar production” in 2025 is particularly misleading. The highest sugar output in recent years was 60,204 metric tonnes in 2023, as reported by the Honourable Minister of Finance in his Budget Statement. This figure exceeds the production recorded in 2025, according to information provided to me by a senior GuySuCo Manager. To portray 2025 as a benchmark year while ignoring superior performance in earlier years amounts to historical revisionism. Sugar production today remains a fraction of what it once was under the David Granger Government, and rhetorical optimism cannot disguise the reality that GuySuCo continues to operate far below sustainable capacity.
More troubling is the significant loss of productive potential in the fields. A GuySuCo insider indicated that there was sufficient cane available in 2025 to produce approximately 75,000 metric tonnes of sugar. However, an estimated 400,000 metric tonnes of canes that matured in 2025, will now be harvested months beyond its optimal age, when dry conditions return in early 2026. Agronomically, this is damaging: over-aged cane experiences sucrose inversion into reducing sugars, increased respiration that burns stored sugar, and a sharp decline in juice purity. The result is lower recoverable sugar and reduced milling efficiency.
The financial impact of this delayed harvesting has been estimated at approximately GY$1.6 billion. I am informed that this situation was brought to GAWU’s attention as early as September 2025, with the expectation that the union would help mobilise workers to improve productivity—benefiting both the industry and the workers themselves. That did not occur.
GAWU’s attempts to associate itself with marginal fluctuations in output are therefore difficult to accept, particularly given its longstanding failure to demand accountability within GuySuCo’s leadership. Years of weak management, politically influenced appointments, and
limited technical competence have drained resources and eroded morale. Notably, GAWU strongly supported the appointment of Mr. Vishnu Panday—formerly its representative on the GuySuCo Board—as Agriculture Director. Under his oversight, GuySuCo produced approximately 47,000 metric tonnes of sugar in 2024. When his contract was not renewed at the end of that year, GAWU allegedly actively opposed the Board’s decision. This pattern reflects a union more inclined to defend incompetence in their friends than to insist on performance, while ordinary workers absorb the consequences through uncertainty and stagnant wages.
The contrast between the GAWU of today and the principled leadership associated with the late Mr. Komal Chand is stark. The union’s present posture raises serious questions about independence, priorities, and its commitment to the long-term viability of the sugar industry.
Statements by the current leadership led by Mr. Seepaul Narine and Mr. Aslim Singh, repeatedly emphasise “defending workers’ rights,” yet measurable outcomes tell a different story. Wages remain uncompetitive, estates are under-resourced, occupational safety remains uneven, and worker attrition has reached historically high levels as labour exits the industry altogether. On key industrial relations indicators, GAWU’s performance in 2025 can only earn it a failed grade.
GAWU’s public praise for government financial support to GuySuCo further exposes these contradictions. Billions of dollars in public funds have been injected into the industry, yet productivity remains weak and structural deficiencies unresolved. A responsible union would be asking hard questions about expenditure, outcomes, audits, and managerial accountability—not merely applauding subsidies while workers see little tangible benefit.
Equally concerning is the silence surrounding the planting of cane at Skeldon Estate in the absence of a functioning sugar factory. Approximately GY$1.6 billion has reportedly been spent there in 2025, with no clear explanation of timelines, deliverables, or end goals. While GAWU is aware of these developments—as it ought to be—it has a duty to inform the nation and defend the interests of its members and the taxpayers.
While the call for an increased national minimum wage is valid in principle, it is weakened by the union’s lack of credibility in its own largest sector. Sustainable wage growth requires productivity, discipline, and accountability within a functioning industry—not statements detached from operational realities.
In the final analysis, GAWU’s End-of-Year statement is long on rhetoric and short on substance. It avoids responsibility, inflates modest developments, and sidesteps the central issue confronting sugar workers: an industry hollowed out by years of poor decisions, tolerated incompetence, and ineffective union leadership. Until GAWU confronts its own role in GuySuCo’s decline and demands excellence rather than loyalty, its declarations of commitment to workers will remain aspirational rather than real.
Guyana’s sugar workers deserve honesty, accountability, and results—not recycled rhetoric presented as hope.