After missing this week’s much-anticipated start of sugar harvest, the man at the helm of the two companies that have taken over the industry has announced that Monday will definitely see the mills grinding.
“[The crop] should start on Monday. I think everything should be in place for Monday. We are ready now, but obviously, there are other things like licensing and so on that have to be done. The expectation is that by Monday they will be [finished],” Lieutenant Colonel Trevor Browne who heads the twin firms – the Barbados Energy and Sugar Company Limited (BESCO) and the Agricultural Business Company Limited (ABC) – told Barbados TODAY on Friday.
On March 14, Lt Col Browne said he expected the canes to be received over last weekend with the Portvale mill to begin grinding this past Monday.
But on Friday he insisted that the historic harvest – for the first time under mostly cooperative ownership – will see even more changes ahead.
“We will be doing things differently going forward, so don’t be surprised, it’s not business as usual. I am telling you and everybody now, the sugar industry is being run by a different organisation. What happened in the past and what was important in the past makes no difference to us. I have no interest in that,” he said.
The retired engineer was adamant that the timing of the crop was a decision for him and his management team.
The other group of private sugar estate owners, Barbados Sugar Industry Limited (BSIL), the last remnant of the sugar planters who ran the industry for most of its 400-year history, insisted that Monday’s start was already five weeks behind schedule. He contended that February 15 would have been the ideal commencement time to obtain maximum tonnage and sugar-to-cane ratio.
“That is going to affect the plant cane, definitel. It’s not ideal,” said BSIL chairman Mark Sealy. “I know the factory had some work to do. They said they will be ready by Monday. What we are hoping for is that the truckers will be ready also because I believe that they have passed the blue bins now, which are the ones that draw the cane from the fields. But they have to get insurance and the insurance takes a couple days, so I am hoping they will be ready for Monday.
“There are no payment issues, we are all up to date…but you know, hopefully, it will be better next year. But March 23 is definitely too late to start the crop, and the cane is going to be way over the necessary ‘pol’, and you are going to see degradation of the sugar and the tons of sugar to the tons of cane…because it’s very, very dry and very hot at the moment, and the cane has dried out,” he said.
‘Pol’, or polarisation, measures the purity of the sugar, with the sucrose content of the sugar provided as a mass percentage.
Sealy also explained that after canes have been planted in the ground for 18 months, another month could lead to the cane getting over ripe, resulting in reduced tonnage, and an increase in rats.
“It’s something we have preached about for the last five years, that we need to start at February 15. Obviously, we know that this is a year of transition. But going forward, we need to start a lot earlier,” the private cane farmers spokesman insisted.
He stressed that although the amount of acreage planted in cane this year is higher, output would be much better had the harvest got off the ground in the middle of last month.
Official data shows that in 2022, total sugar cane production was just under 96 000 tonnes, rising to 109 493 tonnes in 2023, which produced 7 048 tonnes of molasses and 6 848 tonnes of sugar. Last year, the BSIL farmers produced 79 000 tonnes of cane and they estimate they would produce about 85 000 this year, an increase of about seven per cent.
In a separate development, the workers who were transitioned from the state-owned Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) to the new private companies, have started receiving their separation pay.
Lt Col Browne has said that most of the former BAMC employees have been rehired, including most of the 100 workers at the lone Portvale Sugar Factory.
The Barbados Sustainable Energy Co-operative Society Limited (Co-op Energy) – of which Lt Col Browne is president – is the parent company of the two firms running the sugar sector.
emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb
