Sugar Cane Quality Improving

Shawn Chavarria

News Five also followed up with Chavarria on B.S.I.’s report last month that sugar cane was coming in with extraneous matter that threatened to shut down the mill.  He says some fifteen thousand tons of sugar cane had deteriorated in quality, as a result of the blockade in front of the A.S.R./B.S.I. compound at the start of the sugar crop.  But, he says the quality of cane they are now receiving has improved.

Shawn Chavarria, Director of Finance, A.S.R./B.S.I.

“We saw that for roughly four days after the crop resumed on the third of January that the quality was really poor. And so, it showed that there was quite a bit of cane out there that had been prepared to enter the mill and didn’t have the opportunity to do so. So, it took us four days to really get out that material. I think what we did was really in a sense the lesser of all evils. We took the cane in even though it is not of good quality. And then we will figure out with the stakeholders how we adjust for the quality matter that it wasn’t at the right quality. At the end of the day though, everybody got the opportunity to bring in that cane and get the crop going. And now, we are seeing much better quality cane.”