Business and Economic Commentary by Christopher Ram
For nearly three decades, save for the five-year interval between 2015 and 2020, the PPP/C has exercised political stewardship over the State-owned GuySuCo. The present Minister of Agriculture has held that portfolio since 2020. The condition of the sugar industry today is therefore not the product of temporary misfortune or inherited instability. It is the cumulative result of sustained political management. The current CEO is a member of the central committee of the party. The immediate past Chairman is now a minister in the 2025 PPP/C government. It is interesting to briefly review its record.
When the PPP/C assumed office in 1992, sugar production stood at 243,010 tonnes. By 2004, under a management contract, output exceeded 320,000 tonnes. That contract ended. Production fell. By 2015, output had declined to 212,000 tonnes. When the administration returned in 2020, production stood at 88,868 tonnes. In the years since, output has fluctuated between approximately 47,000 and 60,000 tonnes, with 47,000 tonnes repeating itself.
The financial record mirrors the operational decline. Between 2004 and 2019, GuySuCo received approximately $95.3 billion in capital allocations. From 2020 to 2025, a further $41.9 billion was committed. Cumulative exposure now stands at roughly $137.3 billion. This is not project support. It is spent capital, even as output contracted.
The explanation cannot lie solely in labour migration, adverse weather, or global sugar prices. Those are industry realities. What distinguishes GuySuCo is the repeated cycle of political misjudgment, and capital initiatives followed by interruption, reversal, or abandonment.
A Packaging Plant costing millions of US Dollars was established at Enmore at significant cost, later dismantled and stored for years. Mechanisation conversion on the Lower East Coast Demerara, costing tens of billions of dollars reportedly progressed substantially before being discontinued. Capital works were undertaken but did not mature into sustained productivity. Comparable initiatives are now proposed elsewhere. A new make of heavy-duty equipment was bought on the wing of hope only to end up in the scrap heap.
In a capital-intensive agricultural enterprise, continuity is indispensable. Capital without continuity does not become productivity. It becomes depreciation.
When major strategic initiatives do not survive their own implementation cycle, the difficulty lies not in rainfall or labour supply, but in policy- formulation, decision-making and execution. Successive chief executives have been introduced with confidence – as turnaround specialists, as industry experts, as reformers. Yet across leadership cycles, the trajectory has remained downward. Titles have changed. Output has changed – but in the wrong direction.
The Minister now projects 100,000 tonnes in 2026 and profitability by 2030. At the same time, the Corporation acknowledges yield per hectare below target, limited factory grinding hours, inefficiencies in cane transport, and recovery rates requiring improvement. To move from under 60,000 tonnes to 100,000 tonnes within two years requires simultaneous correction of every major structural weakness. The history of GuySuCo does not inspire confidence in such radical transformation.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. Of the proposed $8.4 billion operational subsidy for 2026, approximately $6.8 billion is allocated to wages. With a wage bill reportedly near $20 billion, GuySuCo must generate roughly $13 billion in sales merely to complete payroll. That excludes capital replacement, factory rehabilitation, debt servicing, and statutory arrears, including significant arrears obligations to the National Insurance Scheme and other public bodies.
Even if the 100,000-tonne target were achieved, the revenue required per tonne simply to bridge wages would leave limited margin for genuine profitability.
If annual injections in the range of $10 – 15 billion continue through 2029, an additional $40 – $60 billion will be committed before the promised year of profitability arrives. Even assuming sustained net profit thereafter, recovery of those injections would take decades, disregarding the $137.3 billion already expended and ignoring the time value of money. There is no indication that the PPP/C cares that this is neither a financial nor an economic proposition.
While GuySuCo could soon cross the line of no return, the issue is only partly operational. The deeper issue is governance. When policy direction, operational management, and oversight operate within the same political structure, independent commercial scrutiny weakens. In any private enterprise, three decades of declining output accompanied by over $137 billion in capital allocations would trigger restructuring, external review, and clear accountability. Only political considerations sustain current and indefinite architecture.
Sugar is part of Guyana’s history and rural economy. It deserves serious policy, not perpetual experimentation. Support may be justified. Waste is not. Absent radical reform of governance – separating political control from commercial management, imposing independent oversight, and publishing transparent, costed transformation plans, projections of profitability by 2030 are not forecasts. They are wagers.
And the taxpayer is the one paying for this bet of folly.