Enhancing Sugarcane Farmers Resilience to Natural Hazard Events

Godwin Hulse

Another loan brought before the upper chamber was for one million thirteen thousand U.S. dollars from the C.D.B. for sugar cane farmers to restore production, following the effects of the drought that impacted the sugar industry last year. According to Senator for Government Business, Godwin Hulse, who is also the Minister of Food and Agriculture, the new loan is separate from the eight million dollars that were secured for relief to cattle and vegetable farmers affected by the 2019 drought. The loan is intended to provide technical assistance as well as resources for the sugar crop. Hulse says that now that there is finally a farmer’s registry, the farmers will be prorated based on delivery of cane.

Godwin Hulse, Senator for Government Business

“The sugar cane farmers, there were two difficulties. When I became the ministry of agriculture, I gave the task to our team to try and create a databank of farmers. Something that annoyed me from the first day I got into agriculture; we never knew who the farmers were, what they produced, where they were located, what they did – we did not know. We had a problem with sugar farmers to know who would be eligible for relief. We had to take our time to see what they delivered last year when we had the best crop ever in the country and these things tend to go in cycles. One hundred and fifty odd thousand tonnes of sugar; one point something million tonnes of cane. And then we had a drought and the estimated losses were about thirty to forty percent. So we prorated the money across those farmers based on their potential delivery. In other words, weh dehn mi wah deliver as opposed to what they will deliver; that difference. And this is how this came about.”