90 workers laid off at Sugar Company

There’s a sour taste in the mouths of sugar workers tonight as the country’s only processor, Belize Sugar Industries Limited, has confirmed that approximately ninety members of staff will be laid off. According to BSI’s Chief of Operations, Lennox Neal, effective October twenty-seventh, ninety employees, including factory workers, cultivation personnel and dockhands, will be made redundant under this first stage of the company’s ongoing restructuring programme. Neal told News 5 that of that number, thirty percent volunteered to leave as their redundancy package proved more attractive than retirement. Neal says that BSI has concluded that in light of serious changes in the way Belizean sugar is sold to the European Union and years of tough times for the company, management has deemed it necessary to reconfigure the operation to make it more competitive. BSI decided that in order to increase efficiency they would have to make cuts in areas where it was clear they were employing more people than necessary. According to Neal, management will be closely monitoring the effects of these changes within the company so that at the end of the 2004/2005 season, administrators will be able to institute the second round of restructuring from an informed basis. The operations manager says these measures have been conducted in consultation with the Belize Workers’ Union in order to ensure that employees have a clear understanding of why the company’s actions were necessary. Presently, Belize has the benefit of selling its sugar to European buyers under the protection of preferential prices, but as a result of persistent protests from countries like Australia, Brazil and Thailand in the World Trade Organization, the EU will be forced to remove subsidies on sugar paid to African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, including Belize. For its part, Belize is lobbying for increased market access in Europe, re-allocation of sugar quotas and the establishment of a competitiveness fund to assist in the repositioning of Belize’s sugar industry. Negotiators are also insisting that licenses be issued to states and not companies, a scenario that is also playing out in negotiations in the banana industry. The European market accounts for around forty percent of Belize’s sugar sales and has traditionally paid the highest prices.