The 2013 sugar cane harvest began earlier this month with industry officials preparing for a decline in cane and sugar yields.
With three weeks of harvesting having been lost for various reasons, chairman of the Barbados Sugar Industry Limited, Dr Attlee Brathwaite, said the harvest was expected to yield 18 000 tonnes of sugar. This is down from 24 526.15 tonnes last year.
The projected cane yield was 202 941 tonnes, which is just over 55 000 tonnes less than the 258 600.62 recorded from last year’s crop. Brathwaite said tonnage would be lost because of the late start.
Declining yields and the increasing unprofitability of growing sugar cane over the years has caused many to sound the death knell for the industry in the absence of a major overhaul.
In the MIDWEEK NATION of January 19, 2011, Brathwaite stressed that the industry had to be expanded in order to survive.
He said the island could ill afford its demise.
“To sell raw sugar at the prices that obtain now, it would not be viable,” he said. “There are still good prices that one could fetch for specialized sugar.
“In addition to that, if one examines the world market trend, the price of even raw sugar is increasing. [But] the quantity that we produce does not allow us to maximize the benefits from increased prices.
“The heart of sugar production is to make certain that farmers get a reasonable return for their efforts.”
Brathwaite said the industry had two clients to take into consideration: the national client and the individual farmer. The latter concentrates on foreign exchange and the farmer thinks of his investment.
“You can’t sit idly by and allow the sugar industry to disappear from Barbados. It just can’t.?When you are talking about viability you have to think of national profitability as well as that on the level of the farmer. At the individual level, given the price of raw sugar, it is not viable.
“But when you look at the various products that sugar cane can produce, you can sense levels of viability.”
Brathwaite identified ethanol as one of the spin-offs from sugar cane.
“If you produce ethanol and you start restructuring how you utilize, say, the gas – say, replace ten per cent of your gas by ethanol – then it is a very viable undertaking because we import petrol from Trinidad at a fantastic price.
“And we can produce ethanol at a price below the price that we import petrol from Trinidad. That ten per cent would go a far way in contributing to the viability of the product.”
Brathwaite also said that changing from the sugar industry would be difficult because there was significant investment in it.
“If you survey the farms, people are still trying to grow sugar. They know how to grow sugar cane and they know that if they take land out of sugar cane to grow crops, they would lose lots of money.”
He added that Barbados did not have a type of marketing system that provided marketing intelligence to regulate planting of food crops.
“Unless we have an export market – and that requires comparative advantage – because some of the other places can produce vegetables more cheaply, we would have a difficulty. So we have to keep sugar as a core crop,” Brathwaite said.
In the DAILY NATION of March 17, 2011, Minister of Agriculture Dr David Estwick said an ambitious plan that would see the sugar industry producing items such as wax and lignin and generating more electricity was still on the cards.
During debate on the 2011-2012 Estimates Of Revenue And Expenditure in the House of Assembly he told parliamentarians the industry was losing about $1 460 on each tonne of sugar produced.
“The industry in its present form . . . is therefore not sustainable,” he pointed out.
“ . . . This is the plan. This administration has moved to form the Barbados Cane Industry Corporation. Under the management of the Barbados Agricultural Management Company, the objective is to diversify the number of products that one can get from the sugar cane plant.”
The plan was to produce “specialty sugars”, electricity from bagasse, waxes and lignin, a compound with industrial uses including as a dispersant in high-performance cement applications and an additive in oilfield works and agricultural chemicals.
“We are far advanced in that arrangement towards the development of a multi-purpose sugar factory and we also want to say . . . that this factory will have the capacity to produce electricity for the grid,” he said.
In the MIDWEEK NATION of September 12, 2012, it was reported that Cabinet had approved plans for the new factory and potential financiers seemed enthusiastic about it.
The factory’s products would include specialized and refined sugar, and refined molasses geared to producing quality rum.
Expected to cost about US$200 million (BDS$400 million), it was expected to come on stream by 2016 and be situated with an adjoining three acres of land at the site of Andrews Factory in St Joseph.
The project was being discussed with several funding agencies, Chinese investors and other private independent local and regional financial agencies.
