And while ASR/BSI insists that they can mill all the cane in the north, Agriculture Minister Jose Mai isn't so sure.
Mai, who is a cane farmer himself, commented publicly that from his information, there will be a lot of standover cane, which will devastate farmers:
Hon. Jose Abelardo Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"The fact is that there is an abundance of sugarcane in the northern districts, they will be a surplus sugarcane. The amount of cane out there, the milling rate and the number of day for milling, it is impossible for ASR to absorb all the sugarcane. 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 later down the road in court with this, so we are very careful what we do. We don't want to antagonize, we are not here to undermine any of the stakeholders. That is not our objective. Our objective is to ensure that farmers sell their sugarcane and that that the industry can survive. That is our objective."
"It is unfair that the cane farmers be left with more than 100,000 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. That being said, there is an urgent need to overhaul the sugar industry act. The sugar industry act speaks of manufacturers, it don't speak of manufacture, so manufacturers should be on the sugar industry control board and the other bodies of the sugar industry control board. So we are looking at that right now. Our attorney general's office is working on that to see where we can fix this problem, but farmers cannot continue to produce sugarcane and let it be left in the field to rot. I am a cane farmers, I have suffered that. I suffered tremendously with the drought, I lost 57% of my sugarcane production. I couldn't even pay my bank note. This government today was voted in on the platform that there are here for the farmers, cane farmers and all."
