TWO PRIVATELY-OWNED sugar factories Worthy Park in St. Catherine and Appleton in St. Elizabeth are doing well in sugar production, according to Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke.
Pointing out that Worthy Park produced an average of 80 to 90 tonnes of cane per hectare, when compared to the national average of about 45 tonnes, Minister Clarke said "it can stand against any sugar factory anywhere in the world.
"In the heyday when they used to earn money, they re-invested some of that capital into their plant and every year there is a maintenance programme that is carried out, and that factory is one of the most efficient sugar factories in Jamaica today," he said.
The Minister was giving a report on the status of Jamaica's sugar industry at a meeting of Ministers of Agriculture in the Caribbean Region at the Jamaica Conference Centre in Kingston on Friday. The meeting was put on by the Inter-American Institute for Co-operation on Agriculture (IICA).
Mr. Clarke said Worthy Park also had good agronomic practices that most sugar farmers needed to adopt. "They make sure that when they establish a field it is properly established," he added.
Turning to the Appleton Sugar Factory that is owned by Wray and Nephew Limited, the Minister said the company has been able to do some major refurbishing.
"They have made their sugar factory probably the most modern plant in the Caribbean at this point in time. The factory is fully computerised and they are into mechanical harvesting in a very good way and what they are doing is telling us that this is the way to go," he said.
The Minister indicated that the factory had also moved their grinding rates up and had brought in personnel from Australia, "and they are prepared now to share that expertise with us as far as their layout of the fields go."
"So there is a future for sugar, but it has to be re-organised in a very serious way," the Minister emphasised.
With regard to sugar cane varieties, Minister Clarke said agronomists, scientists and breeders seemed to be at a loss to come up with varieties that were suitable for getting good returns in sugar.
"We have not been able to get the kind of varieties suitable to our conditions to deal with both sucrose content and production," he noted.
He reported that Jamaica's sugar industry had moved from a high of 512,000 tonnes in the 1960s to a low of 186,000 tonnes in 1998. "Last year we went up to 204,000 tonnes and this crop we are at 217,000 tonnes. We were very fearful that we would have dropped back again, but the weather seems to be helping at this time," the Minister said.
Mr. Clarke said a major problem affecting sugar production was that there was not enough cane to have that throughput at each factory.
"A factory is geared to run a minimum of 20 hours per day and once we begin to be out of cane, you find yourself in a situation where you are losing money because you are employing the people to do nothing," he pointed out.
