PM on Sugar Price: Increase Production, Better Prices

Prime Minister John Briceño

The Prime Minister also reacted to the record sugar cane price that stakeholders in the industry realised this year. On Monday, A.S.R./B.S.I. announced that all cane farmers’ associations with whom it conducts business received eighty-six dollars and twenty-eight cents per ton of cane. It’s the highest in eight years, which the PM says is good news for the industry.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“If you notice, we produced less sugar, but we collected pretty much the same amount – just a few thousand dollars off or maybe a million off – which is great news. Eighty-five dollars per ton is a record price that we haven’t seen since we lost the quotas from the European Union. But it is a combination of many things. We must commend B.S.I./A.S.R. – I know there has been this contention with the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association over their contract, but they have been making the necessary investments in improving the quality of sugar. So now we have what we call the direct consumption sugar, the DCS. And the direct consumption sugars then allow us to get even a better price because that’s almost like refined sugar; that’s why we were fighting with Trinidad and Tobago to buy our sugar. So a combination of things, but our farmers need help. And there is one thing that we’ve noticed over this time because of the drought, the dryness, is that you have to put the inputs, you have to put fertilizers in there. And unfortunately, the members of the B.S.C.F.A. because of the contention with Fairtrade, they did not get their Fairtrade money. But what I am happy about now is that B.S.I. is realizing that when you do that, once you kinda maybe – I don’t want to use the word punish cause that’s too harsh a word – where they do not encourage Fairtrade to work with the B.S.C.F.A., at the end of the day all of us lose because the production goes down. We need to increase production. We don’t need to plant more cane, but if we increase production, we could do a lot more and it could have been a lot better off.”