Sugar Season Closes with Lowest Cane Delivery on Record

The 2024-2025 sugar season is closing tomorrow with the worst cane delivery on record. Love News understands that farmers will not be meeting the nine-hundred-thousand-ton mark for deliveries to the factory. This is reportedly due to several factors, including inclement weather and a shortage of manpower. According to the Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association (BSCFA), the largest cane farmer association in the country, farmers have hundreds of thousands of tons left in their fields. Alfredo Ortega, Chairman of the Committee of Management, BSCFA, says that while they won’t make the nine-hundred-thousand-ton mark, they will be close.

Alfredo Ortega, Chairman, Committee of Management, BSCFA: “It has been very rough for the farmers at large, not only the BSCFA, but all the farmers because of the inclement weather that we have. Really, that has put an issue that we are unable to deliver all the cane we have combined with the manpower that was not available for quite a period of time. So it is not a nice ending for the cane farmers, especially for those that are staying with their cane in the field. So this crop is well like other crop but this one is a very funny one because we thought that we won’t have a lot of rain as we are experiencing now at this point in time. We might not reach 900 but we will be very close to it. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have the production. The production is there. But combining everything and with the weather, the inclement weather, well we see that we’ll be staying like in the vicinity of 40,000 tons in the field. I think we have delivered a little bit over 850, if I’m not mistaken. So, the little amount that will be going in between today, tonight and tomorrow, I don’t think it will be a lot because of the situation we are facing right now with the weather. So it’s very likely that delivered to the mill, we might not reach the 900,000 tons. But combining what we have delivered and what is staying in the field, yes, we can say that yes we had the 900 plus thousand tons of cane produced for this crop that is ending.”

Ortega says that a major setback for farmers this season was the presence of diseases, including Fusarium.

Alfredo Ortega, Chairman, Committee of Management, BSCFA: ‘That’s a very, a very cruel test that we are experiencing now. We, according to the experts that that has been for quite a while in the ground, but we didn’t had seen any losses because of fusarium that now we are experiencing that when it was announced in October last year and now during the course of the crop we saw those canes that were infested with the fusarium that really demonstrated a lack of growth and a lack of weight in them. So that really cause a huge problem for all those farmers that their product was infected. Also we saw a reduction in regards to yield per acre because of the situation with the fusarium combined with the frog hopper and also the stem bore. So there were three things in a row that hit the cane farming community that really reduced the amount of production. That doesn’t mean that there was a reduction in regards to acreage. We have all the acreage but the problem is the pests that we experienced in the months where our cane was growing. So now that we harvest we saw much more visible the issues with those pests that damaged some of the fields very extremely.” 

The Ministry of Agriculture is projecting a revenue shortfall of over fifty-two million dollars for the sugar industry this year, between the drop in deliveries and low sugar prices on the world market. Love News understands that Belize Sugar Industries (ASR/BSI) will be holding a press conference tomorrow to discuss the end of the crop.