Dear Editor,

No doubt about it. The March general elections were decided, not by those who were dancing to the fanfare and future expectations of oil, but by those former sugar workers whose children could not go to school because there was simply no food. I know. I visited a few former sugar estate communities, specifically at Wales and Enterprise, and saw more hungry children than I ever saw, even during the destabilization decade of the sixties.

Regardless of political ideologies and discriminating administrations, no one should go hungry in a country which is principally agricultural and rural in economic setting and presently witnessing structural transition to an oil economy and an encouraging degree of commercialization of agriculture.

Yet poverty and hunger have been institutional characteristics of an enclave sugar economy that co-existed within, and greatly influenced the national economy, as well as the politics and sociology of the whole society not just the past five years or forty, but for hundreds of years.

Which therefore begs the reasonable, rational mind to think in the line of two major transformations: one ideological, the other structural. Afterall, reasonable, rational people do not govern and do the same thing over and over and over for a hundred years and expect different results as apparently all past administrations have been doing the past forty years. Reasonable, rational, and I daresay, nationalistic leaders with futuristic ideas embark on structural, institutional, and infrastructural development changes and projects (like the subway system of New York City) that will last for hundreds of years.

In term of ideology transformation, it must be noted that there exists, and has always existed ever since sugar was introduced in the third world, a serious antagonistic relationship between capital and labour, simply put, between ownership and workers. Ownership has on countless occasions through history pulled sugar out of disastrous bankruptcies by sheer exploitation of labour as expressed by slavery, indentured-neo-slavery, and current wage slavery. The mere shifting from slavery to indentureship was one such major instance as proven by Dr. Eric Williams in his doctoral thesis, later published in a book as, Capitalism and Slavery; and again by Hugh Tinker in his book, (Indentureship) A New System of Slavery; and even by me, in a Labor Economics paper at UG in 1978.

Labour, on the other hand, even sometimes aided and abetted by their respectable trade unions, have sabotaged the industrys productive and productivity capacities in a multiplicity of ways.

Hence, that antagonistic relationship definitely needs to change to a more favourable one, one in which there is mutual positive contributions to each other, and to the enclave industry, and to the national economy by both labour and owner.

Labour and owner must become one. Since the industry is principally agricultural, and land is the main form of capital, then the labour must belong to the land and the land must belong to labour. Which reminds me of a saying by Chief Seattle that I saw inscribed on a plaque in a museum in Kansas: The land does not belong to the people, the people belong to the land, and only when this is so can there be harmony between the two. The old, dirty, primitive savage even then, taught us that development is not only about landscapes, as is commonly perceived, but more about the transformation of lives. And concomitantly further, that economic development is about restructuring and transformation of the means, forces, and relations of production.

Oh God, when are we going to learn from those who did not attend our universities?

This is the first prerequisite to any agrarian reforms, and the utilization of agriculture to launch the economic development of any country. No country has ever jumped straight into industrialization by bypassing agriculture. It is and was imbecilic of wealthy oil-producing countries to have thought so, (and I say unapologetically, also the PNC and their mass of jump-up supporters). Wisely, most of these oil barons have corrected themselves the past thirty years or so after they realized that they had oceans of money but no food. Too bad Venezuela and Nigeria did not learn this lesson.

For fear of boring the reader, I will pause here, and having dealt somewhat on the ideological aspect of this proposal, I will continue soon on the second aspect of the economics of agriculture, a subject of which I am more comfortable.

Suffice the reader to know that I will write about Wales. I know every nook and cranny about Wales. I know the food productive capabilities of Wales. Wales was the fruit basket of the Caribbean; I was born in Wales and wrote a book about Wales that won the Guyana Prize for Literature.

But I now have on my economist cap.

Yours faithfully,

Gokarran Sukhdeo

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Labour and owner must become one if sugar industry to thrive - Stabroek News