B.S.I.’s Mac McLachlan Appointed Chairman of Sugar Association of the Caribbean

William Neal

During the virtual meeting, directors acknowledged the continued increase in B.S.I.’s annual sugar production which is projected at one hundred and twenty-six thousand tons for this crop season. Additionally, the association’s board of directors appointed Mac McLachlan as Chairman of the Association for the remainder of 2022, 2023 financial year and 2023 to 2024. We spoke with Communications Officer William Neal about what this appointment means for Belize and the association moving forward.

William Neal, Communications Officer, SAC

“With Mac as the Chairman of the Sugar Association, it’s not about benefits so much directly to one country. It’s how we can galvanize an association to really make sure that what we’re doing is charting a way forward that is best for everybody. Towards that end, we have created a work plan that ties in with CARICOM’s desire to actually reduce the food import bill by twenty-five percent by 2025. What we see with sugar, Guyana is on a rebound, and they’re going up to one hundred thousand  you know, Barbados stays about the same, and we’re not fully sure of the status of where Jamaica is, but it should be somewhere around forty. Cumulatively, we have more than enough sugar to supply the region. So with the work plan, what we can do, look at perhaps sourcing funds from Green Climate Fund because any agro producer will tell you that the challenges of climate change are real. So we have to work to mitigate those challenges. We’ve had flooding, for example, in Guyana consecutively that has really inundated the cane fields and affected their production, but we know in Belize at the same time, we’re having, you know crops that are sandwiched between floods and then by droughts. So, you know, we have to start looking at what we’re doing as a region, and perhaps because of the size of our countries and the size of our industries individually, we have to do something that is more comprehensive that would bring all four to benefit from some of the larger projects that are the Green Climate Fund, for example, manages and affords  to countries like Belize, Jamaica, Guyana and Barbados.”