B.S.I Says Meets with N.T.U.C.B Over Impasse with B.S.C.F.A

Shawn Chavarria

While the B.S.C.F.A. has discouraged its farmers from delivering cane, some of the association’s members have still taken around three hundred thousand tons of cane for milling. The B.S.I today held a press conference to give the media an update to a meeting it had today with the National Trade Union Congress of Belize. It basically presented records with the union to show its position that it cannot offer the B.S.C.F.A. any more than it is for the cane that its members deliver. One of the key issues that the B.S.C.F.A. has cited is the cost of port fees at Big Creek. B.S.I.’s Director of Finance, Shawn Chavarria explained how the fees came about.

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

“The port fees came about following the investment and transition to the Port of Big Creek. Prior to making that investment, we had discussions with all our stakeholders, employees, with the associations, even with government to inform them of the decision to move up our logistics operations, particularly for raw sugar and molasses from Belize City to Big Creek. It would have required a significant investment of $30 million, but after doing a trial at the port in 2019, after analyzing the results, it was determined that moving to transitioning to Big Creek would result in significant cost savings for the industry, which both the mill and the farmers would benefit from. So we had the trial, we shared the results of that trials with the associations, and we said that it was determined that it would make sense for us to make that investment and move to Big Creek. So we undertook the investment and we started shipping raw sugar from the 2022 crop.  As part of that investment, there would have been what is called a throughput fee that would have been paid to the Port of Big Creek. And a throughput fee is a cost that you’d have to pay to the port to ship raw sugar and molasses via that port. It was a different arrangement than what we had with the Port of Belize City. In the Port of Belize City, the sugar ships could not come to the port because of the shallowness there. So the vessels would have to anchor Robinson’s Point, which is about six, seven miles offshore, and we would’ve moved our barges and tugs alongside the vessel and loaded the ships there. The stevedores of the Port of Belize City provided the loading services. So we were charged [for] stevedoring. Moving to Big Creek now, we would lease land to build a warehouse and to build molasses tanks where we can have the ships come inside the port. That would allow us to load the ships much faster, so Big Creek would charge stevedoring and throughput fees. But the cost that the Port of Big Creek would have charged us would have been significantly lower than what we were paying in Belize City, about 50 percent lower. And so farmers and B.S.I would have seen a benefit from that transition. So we would have incurred less port fees. Also, we would have incurred lower ocean freight costs because the vessel, for example, loading a 30,000 ton vessel in Belize City would have taken us about 60 days to load, versus six days in the Port of Big Creek. So that would have also resulted in significant cost savings.”