BELIZE CITY, Wed. May 5, 2021– Following Cabinet’s decision to allow northern cane farmers to sell their surplus cane to the Santander Sugar Company, the BSI/ASR group issued a public statement which claims that government’s decision was based on flawed assumptions and without due consultations. They also sent an open letter to the cane farmers cautioning them about the potential risks and challenges involved in selling cane to Santander, and the Vice President of International Relations of ASR, Mac McLachlan, also spoke to the media regarding the group’s surprise and concern over the Cabinet’s decision.

The Minister of Agriculture, Hon. Jose Abelardo Mai, however, is stating that despite ASR/BSI’s assertions that they can mill all the cane produced by the caneros, there is, in fact, a surplus of cane that the BSI would never be capable of processing on their own. When asked about the Cabinet’s decision to allow cane farmers to sell to Santander, Mai said, “The fact is that there is an abundance of sugar cane in the northern districts. There will be a surplus of sugar cane. The amount of cane out there, the milling rate and the number of days to milling, it is impossible for ASR to absorb all the sugar cane. Now Cabinet has made a decision. It has been ratified at the Sugar Industry Control Board level. We are left to operationalize it. But we want to ensure that we do things the right way. We don’t want to be a later down the road in court with this. So, we are very careful with what we do. We don’t want to antagonize. We are not here to undermine any of the stakeholders; that is not the objective. The objective is to ensure that farmers sell the sugar cane and that the industry can survive. It is unfair that the cane farmers be left with more than one hundred thousand tons of cane out there. They cannot deliver it, because the mill cannot absorb it, and they are not allowed to sell it to somebody else. It is unfair, it is unjust, and it has to be corrected.”

The Minister also said that there is a desperate need to “overhaul the Sugar Industry Act,” as it refers to “manufacturers” but not “manufacture”. He said that manufacturers should be a part of the SICB and that the Attorney General’s office is reviewing the Act to see where this can be addressed. He, however, feels that the cane farmers cannot continue to forfeit income due to wasted surplus cane and that this PUP administration will do right by the farmers, as they were elected to do.