Mr Sat Maharaj, Secretary General of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, in his commentary published in the Trinidad Guardian of October 18 has taken exception to my Newsday column of October 10 in which I dealt with the closure of Caroni Ltd. I wish to place to rest any misgivings Mr Maharaj may have had.
Following the severe frost in the United Kingdom and Western Europe in the winter of 1963/64, there had been a sharp reduction in the beet crop there and an increase in demand for raw cane sugar. Caroni Ltd's production of raw cane sugar, as a result of this rise in demand, specifically in the United Kingdom, jumped to 205,121 tonnes in 1964, almost double that of the previous year's total of 112,084 tonnes.
In addition, the number of cultivation workers employed by Caroni Ltd rose from 7,274 in 1963 to 11,112 in 1964. Both production and employee levels would slide as the UK and Western Europe's beet production would return to normal in the no frost years that immediately followed 1964.
Mr Maharaj has posited that I tried to be kind to Dr Eric Williams, Trinidad and Tobago's first prime minister, in stating that Dr Williams had to act swiftly when Tate and Lyle decided to close down Caroni, as closure of the sugar company would have meant massive social dislocation. Maharaj appears to dismiss this. Nevertheless, some 10,000 Caroni cultivation workers would have lost their jobs.
Many of their children would have been forced to leave school and seek employment. In turn, less money would have been turned around within the economy, particularly in central Trinidad.
Shopkeepers, haberdashery store owners, owners of parlours, bookstores and farmers would have earned considerably less money as the millions of dollars in total annual earnings of Caroni's cultivation workers would have no longer been available to the workers and to the extended community.
Money from the Sugar Industry Labour Welfare Fund, a revolving fund, would have been no longer available to what would have been former Caroni workers, to either construct new houses or to make additions to homes they had built with earlier loans from the fund.
For the record, Caroni Ltd placed $2.40 into the fund with every tonne of sugar it exported. The construction of houses, as well as additions, had through the years been responsible for the creation of scores of jobs in the construction industry and in other areas, for example, hardware stores, transport and small food operators.
These pluses, these benefits were real and not as Mr Maharaj would have had readers of his column believe as merely "through the perspective of a journalist who seems to have an attitude of 'PNM till I dead'."
Maharaj refuses to accept the reality that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago would later be required to close down Caroni Ltd, because the World Trade Organization (WTO), the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, had enforced a decision forbidding preferential entry quotas.
This country's raw cane sugar which had been bought by the United Kingdom under the preferential entry quota system of the 1975 Convention of Lome and later the Convention of Cotonou, fell victim to the WTO measure. Agreement on the measure, the implementing of "international trading rules and furthering the liberalisation of international trade," had been reached in 1994 at the Uruguay Round. The measure was put into effect in 2002.
Following the Uruguay Round decision which, incidentally, was formalised on January 1, 1995, the 1995-2000 United National Congress administration signalled its intention to close down Caroni Ltd, but was never able to follow through, as by the time the deadline date came around it was no longer in office.
Mr Maharaj appears upset that when I wrote about the closure of Caroni I did not go off on a tangent and deal with issues he determined I should have dealt with. For this, he has advanced that I appeared to have an attitude of "PNM till I dead," whatever that means. It may interest Mr Maharaj to know that since I began exercising my franchise in September of 1956, I have cast my vote for four different political parties!
George F Alleyne
St Ann's
