Muddy Fields and Bad Road Roads Halts Sugar Production  

Today, Belize Sugar Industries (B.S.I.) announced it is temporarily halting sugar production for the 2024-2025 season. This decision comes from key industry players who are trying to tackle the poor quality and low quantity of sugar cane arriving at the mill, largely due to excessive rainfall in Belize. B.S.I. also pointed out that the terrible condition of the sugar roads has made it even harder to get the cane to the mill. William Neal, B.S.I.’s Communication Director, shared more insights into the situation.

 

William Neal, Communications Director, B.S.I.

“We’ve been having rains since October, and that has made it extremely difficult in terms of the field conditions for farmers. First of all, trying to harvest in these conditions. We’ve had reports, of course, from the feeder roads going to the fields. So the fields, the roads have been in very terrible condition and the fields have been in terrible conditions. This is not a good time to be harvesting because obviously the amount of mud and the difficulty that farmers have to extract their cane makes it extremely difficult. So you spend far more energy, in terms of physical energy and also gas, et cetera, to actually bring cane to the factory. Once they’re at the factory, we had to really deal with more than double the amount of mud that the factory can afford to process at this juncture. So it’s really not a good time to actually continue with the cane season, simply because the challenges at the farm level and at the factory level are just extraordinary. The cost in terms of what we’re spending to try and extract sugar from cane that has very poor quality at this juncture, simply because the rains have been so consistent makes it just not viable for us to continue with the cane crop at this juncture.”