And, it happened this week - Minister of Agriculture, Jose Mai, sidelined from the sugar industry in March when the Prime Minister took charge of that portfolio - has now re-emerged, leading the charge to try and salvage a very bad season for sugar.
He amplified his comments on the urgent needs of the industry at a press conference yesterday:
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture & Food Security
"It's bad, It is worse than we had expected, we monitor the reports of the production being delivered to the mill weekly and we look at what is in the field just for you to have an idea in 2024, the production estimate was 1.9 million tons of sugar cane, our estimate this year was 1.045 million. That is a hundred forty five thousand tons less that was estimated but as deliveries continue, the cane delivered in 2024 last year was 1.043 million tons so a million tons round it off to a million tons delivered last year. So this year we said that we can estimate based on the assessment of the field, 900,000 tons. So that's 143,000 less than last year. As of 6:00 this morning the amount of sugar cane milled was 859,625 tons so we haven't even reached the 900,000 ton mark. And I don't think it may be easy to reach the 900,000 ton mark. So up to this morning we are 859,000 if the rains continue for another 2 days I don't think the crop will be able to continue so we might end up with maybe 875,000 tons of sugar cane."
