Sugar’s Ghost

A GBJ Series · Beyond the Resource Curse

Article 9 of 12

GuySuCo’s long death, and the Local Content Act’s early test.

By Nabaclis Piknee · September 30, 2026

My mother’s people worked cane before they worked anything else. When I tell you sugar built this country, I do not mean that as a figure of speech. The roads, the drainage canals, the very shape of the coastland — sugar laid them all out. For the better part of two centuries, it organized Guyanese life around itself. So when I tell you what it felt like to watch that industry die, I am not describing an economic statistic. I am describing a death in the family.

What GuySuCo Used to Mean

Sugar came under state ownership in the 1970s. By then, the industry was already struggling under the gap I described earlier in this series. It had ownership without the full inheritance of technical and managerial capacity. Yet for decades afterwards, GuySuCo remained something larger than a company. In fact, it was the largest employer in the country. It was the reason whole villages existed where they existed. A man’s working life could run entirely through that one industry. So could his pension, his standing in his community, and his children’s school fees — generation after generation. When de estate cough, de whole village catch cold.

I watched that cough become something much worse. For decades, preferential arrangements with Europe had propped up the industry. Then Europe phased them out, and the price of Guyana’s sugar fell. The estates were already inefficient from the underinvestment I described in “The Morning After.” As a result, they could not compete on the open market. One by one through the 2010s, estates closed. Wales. Rose Hall. East Demerara. Skeldon never reached the production levels its design promised in the first place. Ultimately, thousands of workers lost the industry that had organized their entire lives. Many of them were past the age where retraining is easy, or even realistic.

Who Gets Asked What a Transition Should Look Like

Here this piece has to turn from grief to the harder question this whole series keeps asking. Who decides what comes after? And who actually benefits from it? To be sure, the state announced diversification programmes. Some worked in small ways: aquaculture, other crops, small manufacturing on former estate land. But the scale of the promise and the scale of the delivery have rarely matched. Nor is it a coincidence which communities the closures hit hardest. After all, they already had reason to distrust how thoroughly the state consulted them before deciding their future.

This is not just a sugar story. The oil era now faces the same question in a different shape, through the Local Content Act. That law exists because Guyana learned a hard lesson from bauxite, gold and timber, and now, painfully, from sugar. A resource industry can generate enormous activity in a country. Yet it can employ very few of that country’s own people above the lowest rung. It can also build almost no local supply chain around itself. The Local Content Act tries to force a different outcome. It requires that Guyanese companies and Guyanese workers get a genuine, contractually protected share of what oil is creating. The alternative is watching the value flow mostly to foreign contractors, the way it so often did before.

The Same Question, Asked a Fourth Time

I support that law. I supported the spirit behind it before it had a name, because I watched what happens without it. But a law on paper is not yet a habit in practice. Indeed, this series has already shown you, three times over, how much distance can open up between the two. So I ask two questions. First, will Local Content enforcement have the teeth and the independence to survive political pressure when a foreign contractor complains? Parliament has already amended the resource fund’s rules once, under pressure. Second, will the Guyanese companies who benefit be capable firms building real expertise? Or will “local content” quietly become a new label on an old pattern? In that pattern, a few well-connected people capture the opportunity. Meanwhile, ordinary Guyanese watch from outside the fence, the way we once watched from outside the bauxite company’s fence.

A resource economy in this country has a long, documented habit of organizing itself to serve people who are not the people doing the work.

— N.P.

The Habit Sugar Exposed

Sugar is not coming back the way it was. I have made a kind of peace with that, though it took me years. What I have not made peace with is the deeper pattern that sugar’s death exposed one more time. A resource economy in this country has a long, documented habit of organizing itself to serve people who are not the people doing the work.

An Early Test

Still, the Local Content Act is this generation’s attempt to finally break that habit. It is an early test of the autonomous imagination in practice. Can it hold against pressure from a foreign contractor and a well-connected countryman alike? Above all, its success will depend on institutions with teeth and on enforcement that survives political pressure. It will also depend on a citizenry confident enough to ask hard questions when the answers start sounding too familiar.

Next Wednesday: Article 10 of 12, “The Vault and the Vote.”

Beyond the Resource Curse — A GBJ Series

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