But while the sugar cane fields endure extreme stress, the BSCFA must also consider its commercial agreement with ASR/BSI at the start of the next season - and whether this year's one will be allowed to roll over. Additionally, they're also in court with BSI/ASR over their Fairtrade funds. Mai mused that both of these highly tense situations may be affected by the dire state of the industry.
Jose Mai, Minister of Agriculture
"I think about that a lot honestly. The farmers are in the court right now with BSI over the Fairtrade funds owed to them somewhere in the vicinity of more than 9 million dollars, I don't know. That's in the courts right now. The farmers want their Fairtrade money. Now there's time for a new commercial agreement. The farmers and the mill are in trouble right now. The mill cannot operate without the farmers and the farmers cannot operate without the mill. The mill with 886,000 tons today, next year what? 700,000 tons maybe. The mill cannot operate with that amount of cane, maintaining a staff or operational cost. So they may have to scale down, they may have to do some restructuring, I don't know, I don't speak for the mill. But all this now complicates the negotiations with the agreement and so again I think of it a lot and I sometimes think what we can do. I think one of the things the industry needs to do is to stop spending on expensive litigation. They both have expensive attorneys, good attorneys aren't cheap, and so we're spending scarce resources on litigation and not focusing on dealing with the problem at hand."
