State of Emergency in Sugar Industry Due to Fungal Disease

Last month, the Ministry of Agriculture declared a state of emergency in the sugar industry because a fungal disease has infected up to forty thousand acres of sugar cane. This disease causes the cane to yellow and wilt, making them unfit for sugar production. With the new crop season starting in just a week, we asked Belize Sugar Industries Communications Director, William Neal, for an update on the search for a cure. Here’s what he had to say.

 

William Neal, Communications Director, B.S.I/A.S.R.

“This is new, so there’s a lot of research still ongoing, but we know some things. One, Corozal. Has been more impacted than Orange Walk. We also know that Fusarium is not new. It was triggered perhaps by the climate change challenges. The extended droughts, the excessive rains. It just created the perfect conditions for it to grow. I don’t think they have identified exactly what species it is. So there’s some best practices that they’re testing, but I don’t think enough time has passed to say how effective those are. Of course you have to do everything that you can to make sure that you have the maximum input and in some cases the estimate is that production could fall as much as thirty percent, that’s significant. That’s one third of your production. So it’s something that we definitely have to, as an industry, focus on and try to mitigate the impact of it.”