Big Creek Better for Business Says BSI/ASR
Malcolm McLachlan
The press also asked about the company’s decision to move its sugar loading operations from the Port of Belize to the Big Creek Port. The company asserts that this will be good for the industry and ultimately the cane farmers who will reportedly see greater returns. B.S.I./A.S.R. says the decision was not influenced by any labor dispute, but industry challenges dating back to 2006.
Malcolm McLachlan, V.P. International Relations, BSI/ASR
“We had to take a business decision for the future of the industry. I believe that some fourteen months ago the dredging of Big Creek Port was concluded which meant that Big Creek could now bring in large vessels to load directly from the quay side. That makes a big difference with the exporting of raw sugar. As you may be aware, we have been for decades now sending our sugar in barges and tugs a hundred and twenty two miles up the New River and down the coast where it is loaded in a very inefficient way into bulk cargo vessels using the ship grabs to do that directly into barges. Now, a year or so, obviously having seen this development in Big Creek, we took a trial run with trucking some sugar to Big Creek and loading it there. We evaluated that, and this is purely a business decision that we looked at investment in Big Creek to put in a loading facility for our raw sugar. And, we confirmed that there was no secret behind this. We had alerted Port of Belize and copied that correspondence to the stevedores.”
Shawn Chavarria , Director of Finance, BSI/ASR
Shawn Chavarria
“One of the things that occurred, several years ago when the EU starting saying, you know what ACP countries, the preferential pricing will start moving away. That started from 2006. The EU provided accompanying measures for sugar. So it looked at different things in the industry that needed to be improved to make it more competitive. So they looked at infrastructure, sugar roads, sugar cane replanting so that fields can be renovated. Another key component was logistics, because everyone here knows that our logistics operation here was inefficient. We had slow loading rates, so that needed to be improved.”
B.S.I./A.S.R. is building a thirty thousand ton warehouse with loading equipment at the Big Creek Port which the company says will bring the local industry up to international standards.
