Dear Editor,
I have been asked by a few colleagues to respond to the release of the claims made by GuySuCo, about it attaining a milestone in production by producing 2,457 tonnes in the week, ending March 7th 2026. It was a milestone alright, but not of progress, but of decline!!
Editor Blairmont has a factory which is built to grind around 100 tonnes of cane per hour (TCH), Rose Hall 140 TCH and Albion around 180 TCH. Unless a factory can work 160 hours per week it can never be competitive. The simple truth is that the fuel for a factory is the biomass of the cane after it is crushed i.e. what we call bagasse, so after a factory runs out of cane for grinding, it can’t just stop operations, since the juice from the canes which were just crushed are still to be processed to produce sugar, so the factory has to continue working and needs fuel to do so, but since there is no new cane coming in, they have to use up reserves of bagasse or buy wood to continue processing what is in train. Grinding hours per week is the single most important feature of the efficiency of any factory. Theoretically therefore those three estates working 160 hours per week should grind 67,200 tonnes per week; assuming 12 tons of cane to make a ton of sugar, the true potential of these three estates is 5600 tonnes of sugar per week!! To be celebrating a production of 2457 tonnes per week by Rose Hall and Albion is ludicrous!
40 years ago no factory dared report to head office on Saturday that they only ground 120 hours in any week due to being out of canes, “heads would absolutely roll”. As a GuySuCo manager at Versailles, I sat in my office on numerous Saturdays when we gave Neil Isaacs at head office in Water Street Georgetown, our production, and in those days Albion was consistently reporting 2000 tons of sugar for the week!
To see the big hoopla about two estates producing 2457 in a week, is to me a very important symptom of how low we have sunk to celebrate such inefficiency and disastrous operations. Clearly these extremely low sugar industry targets today are contributing in no small way to the hopeless situation the corporation finds itself in, when an un-competitive industry is rewarding such disastrous results.
To add insult to injury Blairmont factory is quote “experiencing ongoing mechanical problems” after the massive infusion of funds given to this industry over the past several years, how dare they tell the taxpayers of this country that Blairmont is having mechanical issues affecting its operations, forcing them to take its cane across the Berbice river bridge, to Albion?? I can’t even imagine what that is costing us!! As for the hysterical daily average corporation production declaration now reaching 156 tonnes in a single day!! Albion alone in the 70’s and 80’s was producing over 250 tons per day for decades.
I really can’t think of a single thing I would care to add to this pantomime.