Cane farmers will protest low prices
An alleged failure by government to live up to a commitment made last year has cane farmers seeing red tonight. Spokesmen for the irate farmers claim that in December when B.S.I. was ready to announce its projected price for sugar, that price was set at slightly over thirty-seven dollars per ton. At that depressed level farmers threatened to leave their cane in the fields rather than cut it at a loss. In response government induced B.S.I. to raise the estimate to forty dollars and farmers agreed to make their deliveries. Now the crop is in and the latest projection by Belize Sugar Industries is pegged at an average of only thirty-seven dollars and thirty cents. With Belmopan offering an additional subsidy of just eighty-seven cents, farmers are planning to protest. They claim that the commitment by Prime Minister Said Musa was to make up the full difference if the price of cane fell below the forty-dollar mark. Others who were present at the meeting say that while forty dollars per ton was indeed the target, the actual commitment was that if the price fell below forty dollars government would contribute a subsidy of up to a million dollars toward making up the difference. Regardless of the exact details of the promise, there is no disputing the fact that cane farmers are hurting from the low prices and a protest march is scheduled for Wednesday morning at the Corozal branch of the Cane Farmers Association. Also, in a note to viewers we would like to correct a figure on cane production given in last night’s newscast. We reported that one hundred and eleven thousand tons of cane were delivered to the factory in the latest crop, when in fact that number is the amount of sugar that the factory produced. The amount of cane delivered to B.S.I. totalled one million, one hundred fifty thousand tons. When that figure is divided into the million dollar subsidy announced by government, it comes to eighty-seven cents per ton. That would bring the average total price to thirty-eight dollars and seventeen cents, more than four dollars less than what they received in the year 2000.
