B.S.I. Unsure what Impact of Sugar Halt will be

Starting today, Belize Sugar Industries (BSI) is hitting the brakes on sugar production at the mill. This move comes as farmers and producers struggle with the muddy mess caused by heavy rains. The pause in production will continue until the weather improves, but there’s no clear end in sight. We spoke with BSI Communications Director William Neal to find out how this will affect the local sugar supply. Here’s what he had to say.

 

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

“Just based on what we’re looking at in terms of sugar production the domestic market is small. What we have concerns about is obviously, how we make, the sugars necessary for our contracts that we have. We, it’s still early in the crop.  But what we have to do is make an assessment. We’ve talked about the cane price estimates, and we’ve looked at production shortfalls, but what we’re trying to do at this point is just decide what will be the best thing at this juncture to make sure that we’re not grinding just for grinding sake and that farmers are not trying to just pull out the cane to just say they delivered their cane if there’s no sugar in the cane, we’re wasting time, resources, money, and so are the farmers. So this is the best solution at this point we can’t project in the next six months, how much sugar we’ll have, what we’re hoping for is some improvement in the weather and we’ll continue to work on the mill side to try and extract as much sugar as we possibly can.  More than sixty percent of the industry uses B79, which is a late maturing variety. So it might actually play to that in terms of the ripeness of cane and the optimum time to actually, have extraction. But if the weather continues to be like this, then it still won’t make much of a difference. If we have continuous rains, what we’re seeing as an industry is basically we cannot at this juncture continue to just hollow cane by any means necessary. It’s just not making any, since economically for anybody, because the amount of mud that comes, the quality of the cane is so poor that all around, it’s just a losing situation for everybody.”