The Guyana gov­ern­ment says it will build a sug­ar re­fin­ery at the En­more Es­tate, East Coast De­mer­ara that had been closed since 2018.

“We have an in­vestor, who is in the fi­nal stage of an in­vest­ment de­ci­sion soon, to con­vert the En­more sug­ar es­tate that is now closed in­to a sug­ar re­fin­ery,” Pres­i­dent Ir­faan Ali told the an­nu­al din­ner of the Pri­vate Sec­tor Com­mis­sion’s (PSC) on Mon­day night.

Ali did not name the in­vestor, but said that the En­more fa­cil­i­ty would be able to re­fine up to 180,000 met­ric tonnes of brown sug­ar an­nu­al­ly

Guyana is pro­ject­ing to in­crease brown sug­ar pro­duc­tion to 100,000 tonnes an­nu­al­ly from this year and Pres­i­dent Ali said that this means that Guyana would have to im­port some sug­ar for re­fine­ment.

“What­ev­er we can sup­ply, we’ll sup­ply then we’ll have to fill the gap so re­fin­ing will oc­cur here,” he said, adding that the fa­cil­i­ty is ex­pect­ed to pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties for “hun­dreds of up­skilled jobs”.

The Bar­ba­dos-based Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank (CDB) had in 2019, com­mis­sioned a study to de­ter­mine whether Plan­ta­tion White sug­ar could be used a sub­sti­tute for white sug­ar.

How­ev­er, the Guyana Man­u­fac­tur­ers and Ser­vices As­so­ci­a­tion (GM­SA) lat­er protest­ed plans by Be­lize to seek a 40 per cent Com­mon Ex­ter­nal Tar­iff (CET) on ex­tra-re­gion­al­ly pro­duced re­fined sug­ar.

“If man­u­fac­tur­ers were to use plan­ta­tion white in­stead of re­fined sug­ar, for rea­sons of qual­i­ty, prod­ucts will no longer be as ac­cept­able to con­sumers and will not be able to com­pete on the ba­sis of qual­i­ty with prod­ucts com­ing in­to the re­gion,” the GM­SA said then.