New Sugar Cane Crop Season Commences

Turning now to the north of the country: After several weeks plagued by uncertainty, the new sugar cane crop season finally came to a start today. The Belize Sugar Industries Limited/ American Sugar Refinery Group (BSI/ASR) started to receive cane around midday today; however, there were concerns about whether deliveries would be able to commence today due to the persistently wet weather. BSI/ASR’s Farmer Relations Manager, Olivia Avilez, briefed the media this afternoon on what the start of the new season was like. She says that although there were a bit fewer can deliveries than expected, the mill has been working with what the farmers have at the moment just to get the ball rolling.

Olivia Carballo-Avilez, Cane Farmers Relations Manager, BSI: “We did get updates from the SCPC manager this morning that there wasn’t sufficient cane supply mainly because of the drizzling over the weekend and when you have that farmers are unable to burn. So we do understand that that situation that happened over the weekend but here at the mill we are ready to start the crop season, we were ready since December 19th as you know but today we are ready, we opened the gates still around midday even though we don’t have sufficient cane supply and we are offloading those at the moment so that the farmers able to return with cane supply. The SCPC manager is gathering information from farmers on who was able to burn and who was able to supply the rest of the day. The challenge is with weather we know we contend with at every crop season however this year we seem to have a lot better weather than is usual and so we are going to wait for that cane to come in later today.” 

Avilez says that it is important that once they get the machines up and running, they maintain a steady flow of cane to achieve maximum efficiency.

Olivia Carballo-Avilez, Cane Farmers Relations Manager, BSI: “We haven’t started grinding. We have started to receive the cane and offload we haven’t started grinding because what is important is that when we start we don’t stop. This is a big machine of course it’s an entire system so once we start grinding we want a steady flow so we are awaiting information from the SCPC manager who is confirming the numbers from the cane farmers but we do have some from BSI fields as well which are ready to go and as long as we are able to have good weather I think farmers are able to burn and continue supplying then we’ll go ahead and we estimate later today at around maybe in the late afternoon that we are able to start grinding but receive a we have started.”