Three years after signing historic agreements with the government to take over the management of the struggling sugar industry as a private operation, the cooperative involved said on Saturday it may no longer be running the centuries-old sector following a recent collapse in dispute mediation talks, Barbados TODAY can report.
Chairman of the Barbados Sustainable Energy Cooperative Society (CoopEnergy) Lt Col Trevor Browne said on Saturday that the government has now abandoned the agreements signed in December 2023.
Those agreements transferred management of the state‑owned Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) to CoopEnergy and formed two private companies – Barbados Energy and Sugar Company (BESCO) Ltd. to manage the factory and Agricultural Business Company (ABC) Ltd to oversee 4 500 acres of farmland.
“This particular project, which we have been very excited about, never took off for the simple reason that we were never given any paperwork. We were never given anything that we could actually work. Obviously, based on government’s response to us, it is not going to move forward with us,” Browne told Barbados TODAY.
Asked if the cooperative will still have a role in the sugar sector, the chairman replied: “Well, if they change their mind and said that they wanted to… and that was the reason for the mediation. The mediation was a chance to say, ‘well, we don’t like how things are, but we want some things different.’ But that never came up. So, from what we are seeing, government may well be going ahead, but obviously, they don’t want to go ahead with us.”
Pressed further to state if the cooperative will have a role in the sugar industry in the future, Browne said: “[No] That is how it currently looks, based on government’s position.”
However, he insisted that the cooperative society would still want to be involved in the sugar industry if given the opportunity by the government.
Browne contends that the cooperative’s concept of managing the sector is a revolutionary one.
Asked what this development would mean for the workers and the industry he replied: “Well, I can’t speak for the workers. What it means is that government is no longer going ahead with what they had discussed at first. They might well have some other plans. You know, just like how they don’t talk to you, they don’t talk to us either. They stopped talking to us too. I can only tell you what we are doing. They are not doing anything with us. They seemed to have had a change of mind for some reason. I don’t think the workers are aware of anything. We are not.”
In a press release issued late Friday night, CoopEnergy said, “It is with a deep sense of sadness and disappointment that CoopEnergy Barbados wishes to advise the sugar workers of Barbados, and the general public at large, of the unilateral withdrawal of the Government of Barbados and the Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) from formal contractual agreements cosigned with CoopEnergy to divest the BAMC’s operations into private joint ownership by CoopEnergy and the BAMC sugar workers in the industry.”
The statement said that while this divestment was precipitated by an International Monetary Fund loan conditionality, the BAMC has been costing taxpayers around $20 million each year in subsidies to the sugar industry, and even so, was plagued with problems for many decades.
It noted that working in collaboration with BAMC leadership, CoopEnergy developed a divestment plan which was fully endorsed by the Government and cemented initially with a Memorandum of Understanding.
According to the release, extensive work was then undertaken by CoopEnergy to mobilise general support for the initiative.
Detailed presentations were held with credit unions, co‑op leaders and regulators, and advances were made with massive international resources that are available to support the cooperative movement.
Shareholders’ and Subscription Agreements creating the new companies ABC Inc. and BESCO Inc. were finally approved by Cabinet, and signed on Dec 18, 2023, coinciding with the IMF loan approval.
The cooperative said subsequent to the signing of these agreements, no formal responses to various matters raised by CoopEnergy were forthcoming from BAMC – except for a brief meeting with then Minister of Agriculture Indar Weir on September 8, 2024, following a formal letter to the minister on August 13 from the CoopEnergy Board.
“Public and private demands,” the statement continued, “were then made by BAMC and by government officials, for CoopEnergy to ‘bring money to the table’, while at the same time not providing any formal financial records or clean asset registry for our review, as stipulated in the MOU and the Agreements. BAMC officials also approached other cooperative bodies with invitations to provide funding and were met with the same requirement for formal financial records to be first provided.”
“On August 18, 2025, we received our very first formal correspondence from BAMC advising that they had decided to ‘vitiate’ the Shareholders’ Agreements for both ABC and BESCO with immediate effect. CoopEnergy pointed out to BAMC that the signed contracts made no provision for any such unilateral ‘vitiation’, but rather required that a mediation process be used to seek to resolve any dispute that arose. BAMC then agreed to undertake a mediation process.”
“The mediation process,” the release added, “took place between March and August 2026. It ended without any agreement between the two parties, and also without any indication that continued talks were likely to be fruitful,” CoopEnergy pointed out.
When contacted, Minister of Agriculture Dr Shantal Munro-Knight told Barbados TODAY she would have to be briefed on the matter before commenting at this stage.
In response, the Barbados Workers Union said it is not a party to the contractual agreements between the Government and BAMC, and CoopEnergy.
“We will, therefore, not comment on the details of those contracts. The BWU will continue to stand guard over the interests of the workers and to ensure that any transition, divestment or restructuring in the sugar industry honours the commitments made to them and keeps their welfare at the centre,” the BWU stated on Saturday. (EJ)
