It's a sweet product, but these are sour times for Belize's sugarcane industry. They limped through this year's cane crop and it draws to a close on on Sunday.
All parties agreed to this date after assessing the availability of remaining cane, current factory delivery rates, and weather forecasts for the coming week.
We asked the PM - who is also the Minister of the Sugar Industry to look back on the season:
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"We have just been speaking to Olivia from BSI and she was giving a quick update, just gave me a quick update. Yes. We were very optimistic at the start, but then we had some some serious issues, certainly with the burner at BSI that was giving a lot of problems. And, I think that the, that's the estimate that they made for cane I think was a bit too optimistic. But the good news is that we're closing the crop at the end of the week on Sunday because we're running out cane, we don't have enough cane to be able to keep the factory, for instance, as it is, as we speak, the factory's not working. We hope that later this afternoon work when we get more cane. But we have been producing more sugar for pretty much the same amount of cane that we had last year, which is, that means that the the quality of the sugarcane has has improved. And I'm sure the BSI will also say their sugar production has also improved for us to be able to have more sugar from more or less the same amount of cane that we had last year."
