More cane, less sugar as grinding season ends

It’s not a day that usually makes the headlines, but on Tuesday, the sugar cane processing season officially ended. For cane farmers and the sugar company, it was a year of extremes. This afternoon, officials explained that the while Tower Hill factory received a record one point two million tonnes of cane, the deliveries were the lowest quality that the processing plant has ever handled. According to Chief Operations Manager of Belize Sugar Industries Lennox Neal, bad roads and worse weather were significant factors in the dramatic drop.

Lennox Neal, Chief Operations Mgr., Belize Sugar Industry
“There are several reasons for the poor quality of cane I would say. The main one I would say is that this year we had a very long, what we call kill to mill … that is from the time from you start to harvest the cane to the time that you deliver it to the factory for milling. This year I think the times were excessively long and because of that there was a lot of loss of sugar in the cane before it was milled. Another reason for the lower quality is generally the weather. This year we had a lot of rain starting from in December of last year compared to a normal season, we had a lot of rain and the rain tends to reduce cane quality. But while the quality would have been down a little bit, it would have been better had there been a better management of the delivery of cane to the factory during this season. … We are already starting to work a programme that they call delivery by appointment, which is supposed to result in the best or the shortest time delivery from the time you harvest cane to the point it gets to the factory for processing and that should translate to much better quality cane and even better quality cane than we are used to in the past.”

Janelle Chanona, Reporting
“When would that kick in, that amendment?”

Lennox Neal
“We intend to begin some trials next season and we believe that people would see the benefit of that and people would eventually move towards a system that is more controlled and more sensible I would say and more efficient for the farmers themselves and so we would end up with better quality cane coming to the factory in future. We are also in the process of doing what we call trial runs with payment on the basis of quality, which we’ve—last year for the first time we have been testing a core sampling facility that is set up just outside the factory and eventually we hope that in next, by the year 2009 farmers will be paid on the basis of their individual cane quality rather than average payment as is the case now.”

“We are convinced, that is those of us up here in the north in the sugar industry are convinced that the industry is not an industry is going to die, as a matter of fact we think it’s going to prosper in the future, provided we make those changes that are necessary to make ourselves more efficient.”

There were two hundred and thirty-three days of processing in the 2006/2007 sugar cane season. At close yesterday, one point two million tonnes of cane had been delivered to Tower Hill, from which only ninety-eight thousand tonnes of sugar were extracted. That puts this year’s ratio at an unacceptably high level of twelve point three tonnes of cane for every tonne of sugar.

Last season, one point one seven-three million tonnes of cane produced one hundred and eleven thousand, three hundred tonnes of sugar, representing a ratio of ten point five-three to one.