GuySuCo’s losses over these three years will total $70b — Lancelot Hyman — Opinion

GuySuCo’s losses over these three years will total $70b

September 22, 2026·3 min read

Published in

Kiskadee Watch ·Sep 22, 2026

Dear Editor,

As the sugar workers continue to strike at Blairmont Estate and continue to be ignored by the Board under Mr. Jairam Pitam and the Management under Mr. Paul Cheong^[1], it brings into context the performance of the Management at GuySuCo. The sugar legacy of Mr. Paul Cheong and, by extension, President Irfaan Ali appears to now be in total tatters. This management under Mr. Paul Cheong is producing Guyana sugar at approximately US$3,500 per metric tonne (MT) in 2026 and selling it on the world market at a heavily discounted price because of the impurities in the sugar at US$298 per MT. I dare Mr. Paul Cheong to context these figures, since I have seen official GuySuCo records with this information.

What is clear in 2026 is that the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Zulfikar Mustapha, has pulled himself out entirely from this multi-billion squander, telling insiders that what happens with sugar is based on the decisions between the Office of the President and the Office of the CEO of GuySuCo; end of his story.

Mr. Paul Cheong has been on the GuySuCo Board since 2018 and always chaired the Marketing Sub-Committee of the Board of Directors. Thus, he was integrally involved in the decision-making process around the sale of sugar both locally and internationally since 2018. He ought to know a thing or two on the sale of sugar. However, his performance on the sale of sugar, while he served as the Chief Executive Officer since 2024, has been nothing but dreadful. Did Mr. Paul Cheong learn nothing since 2018? What was he doing as the Chairman of the Marketing Sub-Committee of the Board of Directors all these years?

The evidence of his performance since he assumed office in 2024 is damning:

First, look at the state of play on the sale of sugar. When the numbers are laid bare, it reveals a situation where his tenure since 2024 as the CEO on sugar sales has been nothing less than abysmal.

The minimum this nation expects is that while he is asking this nation to pay for 50% of that US$3,500 that it cost to produce sugar at the end of 2025, he could at least seek out the highest priced markets to sell the sugar – Local, Caribbean and the USA. But from the table in 2023, while the production was 60,234 MT, the company sold 90% of the production to these higher price markets. Mr. Paul Cheong in 2025 has sold 65% of the 2025 production to these higher priced markets. Rather he has sold some 13,200 MT to the world market at a heavily discounted price of US$298 per MT because of the heavy number of impurities in the sugar. What was not told to the National Parliament is that two shiploads of “bagged sugar” were rejected by the buyers in the Caribbean and were under threat of being returned to Guyana. The Corporation had to discount the price even further for the sugar to be further cleaned in that Caribbean country for final resale for the bakeries only since it could did not qualify to be on the supermarket shelves of those islands.

Second, look at the financial haemorrhage. Publicly disclosed figures estimate that GuySuCo incurred combined losses of approximately $40 billion over 2024 and 2025 and is set to incur a further $30 billion loss in 2026. The cost of producing sugar has remained critically high, increasing from US$0.29 per pound when Mr. Cheong took the post of Head of the Marketing Sub-Committee of the Board in 2018 to now US$1.49 per pound at the end of 2025. Meanwhile, the best available market prices are around US$0.46 per pound (the local market). This means GuySuCo is losing more than US$1.00 on every single pound of sugar it sells, even in the high prices Guyana market.

Thirdly, the production failures are undeniable. In 2024, GuySuCo produced just over 47,000 tonnes of sugar, falling significantly short of its target of over 63,000 tonnes. It made 59,600 tonnes of sugar in 2025 and is set to make 55,000 tonnes of sugar in 2026. Internal challenges such as low worker productivity have been highlighted: in 2025, 67% of harvesters failed to meet the daily target of five tonnes, and the corporation lost 3,471 hours of factory time due to a lack of cane to process. Now we are being told by the cane harvesters on strike that because Guyana failed to apply fertilizers on the canes for the last two years, we have a severe situation in the industry of “lite-canes”, similar to “wind-paddy” in the rice industry.

When will the PPP made a decision on the privatization of the sugar industry and when will the political opposition open its eye on this issue that will bleed over $70 billion for the three years that Mr. Paul Cheong is at the helm. Where is the voice of GAWU?

Yours faithfully,
Lancelot Hyman

References

President issues new warning to GuySuCo management over ... — www.stabroeknews.com ↩

President issues new warning to GuySuCo management over ...

www.stabroeknews.com · 2026-01-11

President issues new warning to GuySuCo management over performance - Stabroek News # President issues new warning to GuySuCo management over performance Some of the managers who were in attendance (Office of the President photo) By Stabroek News January 11, 2026 President Irfaan Ali yesterday met with the board of directors and senior management of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) where he voiced strong dissatisfaction with the corporation’s continued underperformance and its failure to meet production targets for 2025. According to information released by the Office of the President following the meeting at State House, the President made it clear that accountability would now be enforced at the estate level, warning that from the first crop of 2026, estates that fail to achieve their assigned targets will face changes in management. The meeting yesterday followed a report in Stabroek News on Thursday about GuySuCo falling below its 2025 revised end of year target. The President told the GuySuCo executives that the current results do not reflect the scale of investment and support being provided by the state to revive the sugar industry, stressing that improved leadership, operational discipline and timely decision making are now non-negotiable. GuySuCo ended 2025 with sugar production of just 59,200 metric tonnes, falling short of even its reduced target of 60,000 tonnes and well below the revised target of 70,000 tonnes and the original goal of 80,000 tonnes. Moreover, the poor 2025 performance followed similarly weak results in previous years. GuySuCo’s audited annual report showed production of 60,207 tonnes in 2023, while sugar output for 2024 declined sharply to 47,103 tonnes, a 21% drop year on year, according to figures presented in the 2025 national budget. These production shortfalls persist despite significant replanting efforts and expanded cane acreage. Over 2023 and 2024, approximately 14,529 hectares of sugarcane were planted, accounting for more than 75% of the corporation’s total cane lands and far exceeding the normal two-year planting target. The programme was supported by direct intervention from President Ali, including private sector participation in planting more than 65% of the new acreage. Sources have identified delayed procurement processes, factory downtime and management inefficiencies as key contributors to the ongoing crisis. At Blairmont, mechanical problems with the turbine have significantly reduced operational capacity, pushing the tonnes of cane required to produce one tonne of sugar to nearly 20, far above the industry norm of around 13. This inefficiency has reportedly led to additional losses of hundreds of millions of dollars in recent weeks. The President had previously warned that continued failures will not be tolerated. Speaking in December 2024, Ali said “I made it very clear that if the targets, the target for 2025; the first crop target, and the second crop target, if the target is not achieved, [because] we are also bringing any technical support to help them. But if those targets are not achieved, then heads will roll. If those targets are not achieved, heads will roll”. In a letter in yesterday’s Stabroek News, GuySuCo Chief Executive Officer Paul Cheong said it was important to consider the 2025 performance in a year-on-year context. He said that when compared with the previous year, overall sugar production increased by 26.5 percent. He said that incremental progress had also been made in areas like mechanization and field performance.