Sugar Production Up

The Belize Sugar Industries, A.S.R. Group is processing its final delivery of sugar cane for the season. The company does not yet know how much sugar was produced in total for the season, but says the cane supply rebounded by up to thirty percent, after a poor crop in 2020. Vice President for International Relations at B.S.I. Malcolm McLachlan gave an overview of the 2020/2021 crop and sugar production.

Malcolm McLachlan, V.P. Intl Relations, BSI/ASR

Malcolm McLachlan

“Yesterday, we concluded the cane delivery for this crop season. It looks like we will end up with just shy of one point two million tons of sugar cane. We are not in the process of liquidating and making the last of the sugar, liquidating the factory and getting ready to basically rip it apart, rebuild it and put in considerable amount o f investment to ensure we are ready to start again in the next season. So, although we have a few seconds to take a break at the very end, we don’t have very long because this really is a twenty-four/ seven business. I want to thank the cane farmers for bringing in all that cane. It was more or less what we were expecting, perhaps a little bit more, remembering that last year was a very poor crop affected by the previous year’s drought. So the cane bounced back quite well. It has been a difficult crop mainly because of the weather. We had a lot of interruptions at the beginning of the crop which really meant that we lost fifteen days early on in the crop.”