BELIZE CITY, Tues. Dec. 29, 2020– Severe wet conditions that negatively impacted the quality of sugarcane in the fields and the condition of the feeder roads used to transport the product forced farmers, who are always hopeful that the Zafra begins in early December so that they can have a little money to spend over the Christmas and New Year’s season, to call for a delay.
The beginning of the cane harvesting season was put off until after Christmas, but this did not mean that farmers were idling until fairer weather improved the quality of the cane and the Ministry of Work’s heavy equipment repaired the roads. While most Belizeans were sitting at home over the holiday period, the cane farmers were hard at work trying to right a situation that had developed that would hurt their bottomline.
On December 24, the largest, and oldest cane farmer association, Belize Sugar Cane Farmers Association (BSCFA), issued a press release that denounced “blatant irregularities committed in the process of determining and approving the Cane Farmer Register for the 2020/2021 sugar cane crop,” which had been prepared by the Sugar Cane Production Committee (SCPC) and approved by the Sugar Industry Control Board (SICB).
The BSCFA release said there wasn’t “full disclosure of all pertinent information equally to all members of the SCPC to enable proper and adequate verification of the production estimates assigned to each registered cane farmer and hence to make an appropriate recommendation regarding the said Cane Farmer Register”, and as a consequence the production estimates were “a gross injustice to the majority of cane farmers.”
Responding to the call by the farmers for their quotas to be revised upwards so that they could harvest more of their sugarcane, Hon. Jose Mai, the Minister of Agriculture, Food Security & Enterprise, spearheaded a meeting of the SICB on December 27 to address the farmers’ concerns.
On December 28, the Government Press Office issued a press release which stated that the concerns of more than 2,700 cane farmers (approximately 50% of existing cane farmers) had been heard, and that there had been a relatively successful resolution of the matter.
The release said that six of the eleven directors of the SICB attended the meeting, and although notably absent were ASR-BSI, the Progressive Sugar Cane Producers Association, and the Corozal Sugar Cane Producers Association, those in attendance at the meeting proceeded to discuss and review the production estimates.
The release said the new production estimates mean that the “cane farmers will not be impacted as negatively as before with the same losses in tonnage of cane delivered to the factory”, and that the “chairman of the SICB, Mr. Marcos Osorio, has instructed the manager of the SCPC to implement the adjustments agreed on during the meeting.”