Sugar industry fights for survival
The recent dispute between union and management at the Tower Hill factory focussed the public’s attention on the sugar industry: a crucial part of our economy that is often ignored by the media. But if you thought that the big news in sugar is labour relations you’d be wrong. Today at a press briefing held by the Ministry of Agriculture, representatives of government, cane farmers, and B.S.I. painted a not-too-pretty picture of the prospects for Belize’s most important agricultural export. According to the experts, factors both inside and outside our borders threaten the very existence of the sugar industry. Externally, the European Union, Belize’s most lucrative market, is under a legal challenge that will almost certainly result in reduced subsidies and significantly lower prices; the U.S. market will also likely shrink as the advantages under the Caribbean Basin Initiative expire and other nations acquire preferred status under the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Even Belize’s increasingly important position on the Caribbean market is threatened as Guyana, CARICOM’s largest producer, invests heavily in new refining capacity. Internally, factors such as low crop yields, high transport costs, and inefficiencies at the factory have kept production costs high, in many cases, higher than corresponding revenues.
But despite the sobering analysis, officials expressed the determined conviction that sugar will remain a key export for many years to come. “Belize is in sugar for the long run,” declared Minister of Foreign Trade Eamon Courtenay. But with the outlook so grim on so many different fronts, News 5’s Stewart Krohn asked the minister whether his statement was based less on sound economics than on political bravado.
Eamon Courtenay, Min. of Foreign Trade
?I believe that we will be able to make the reforms that are required. There are two sides to it, the external and the domestic side. On the domestic side, what we need to do is simply increase the quality of cane and increase the yields. Now increasing the yields is from better husbandry. That is really a matter of getting money to the farmers to allow them to do the changes that are necessary and that is something that we are working on. On the external side it?s a question of the price. In the European Union the price is going to go down between seventeen and thirty-eight percent, we expect. As the slide shows, if it goes down seventeen percent, we are in there for the long haul no doubts about it. We need to ensure that we don?t go below that thirty-eight percent. Now why do I say it?s zero bravado? Because of the relationship that we have with the European Union, they are obligated under the Cotonou Agreement to ensure that no A.C.P. member turns out less economically than we are with them right now, and they know that. How are we going to do that? We have already started with them to do an economic impact assessment on the reform of the European Union market, which would then give us a value of X million dollars, the impact on Belize, and they have to provide that to us. That is the money that we believe we will use to make ourselves more competitive.
