Tonight, there is disruption in the 2019/2020 sugar cane season, which has been put on pause until further notice. The recent heavy rains affecting the entire country has caused the cane fields to become inundated with floodwaters. That is causing excessively muddy cane to enter BSI's Tower Hill Factory, which is threatening to damage their equipment.
Since the heavy rains started during the weekend, that excess mud has since increased to 4 times the recommended amount that the millers can allow their equipment to directly interact with. And so, representatives from the different stakeholder groups in the industry met and took the difficult decision to cease all cane deliveries, as of yesterday morning, until the weather improves. Forecasters believe that the heavy rains should stop by this weekend.
But, it appears that this decision to pause deliveries was clearly not clearly communicated to those thousands of cane farmers in Corozal and Orange Walk. And so, they started cueing up in long lines of trucks as per normal.
BSI says that in order to accommodate these farmers, they still took in 5,000 tonnes more cane than they intended yesterday. That's because the millers are well aware that the farmers are currently struggling with significantly reduced crop yields, caused by 2 consecutive years of drought. But, by the afternoon, the mud situation was getting worse, and so, the millers decided to stop all deliveries. BSI had to close off their entrance, and the cops were called in, just to ensure that there would be no disturbance of the peace.
Our colleagues from CTV3 News spoke with one of BSI's spokesperson on why they had to make the difficult decision in a time when the country needs more economic activity, and not less. Here's how she explained it:
Olivia Avilez. Farmer's Relations Mgr., ASR/BSI
"Honestly, we are being confronted by a really bad weather. We sort of knew that there was a bad weather, we didn't see how much amount of rain was actually coming and we've received substantial amounts of rains and so this is very difficult manner to operate such an industry. First of all we really emphasized with farmers and how they have to take out that cane. They would have to rip their canes out apart to take out that cane, but only that they would be unavoidably a lot of mud coming with that cane. It's not like they can wash the cane at the fields. So knowing the amount of mud that would come in to the factory, we took the decision to advise Cane Farmers Association of the intention of the mill's intention to pause the crop just until the weather conditions improve so that we can then continue the crop. We certainly want to finish this crop. We want to make sure that the cane that is available on the ground is milled, because we understand and know that there is a production drop and of course we want to make the amount of sugar from that cane."
"In terms of mud: what does the mud cause to the factory, because a lot of people don't see the behind the scenes what happens at the factory. First of all the factory is not like a car that can start and stop any time, its needs to plan in advance, because it has the milling operations, it has the sugar making operations and it also has the electrical part from BELCOGEN and all of that. So we have to plan in advance and we usually do this with the cane farmers all the time and we did it this time as well and mud in itself, it's not like you can put sand into your car when you are putting fuel in it, if you would do that and sometimes that happens, it starts to erode everything - the whole mechanics of your vehicle. So that is literally the same thing that happens in the factory. When we run through mud and sand and if the levels are low, so the factory is able to grind cane with some mud in there and we have a parameter of 4.5% mud in cane and then we also have other parameters that we monitor before we arrive to that number and so we were looking at the numbers and it was going double triple that amount. In fact the amount of mud that we were seeing was 16% mud. This is 4 times the amount of mud that the mill is capable of handling."
Avilez also explained that recently, the employees manning BELCOGEN's boilers, which is separated in the production line from the milling process, had to remove 52 tonnes of ash with mud content, caused by the increased intake in the mud. The stakeholders do not want to keep the industry on pause for long, because they want to finish up this crop season as best as possible, given the state of the sugar industry, and the country's economy.
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