Over the next two days, delegates from Belize and other countries in the region will be taking part in a workshop called "Central American Regional Markal Model Development and International Cooperation in Green House Gas Mitigation." That's whole lot of words but still not enough to discuss everything and representatives from sugar producing countries, who are minimally responsible for some of the very green house gases in discussion, are piggy-backing on the event to discuss the endangered status of the sugar industry in the Caribbean. Jamaica's Joshua Jadu is the Chairman of SAC, an organization at the forefront of new developments.
Joshua Jadu, Jamaica
"For this particular meeting that we're having today, it has to do with the repositioning of the regional sugar industries to meet the future of 4 or 5 years down the road, particularly to do with a cut in the preferential prices that we get in the EU market. What we are basically discussing today are what are the alternatives. We are already producing sugar at a certain price, or at a certain cost, and we primarily focused, yesterday, in terms of what are the things we see that is happening today that could be avoided in order to reduce that cost of production. Today we're looking at diversification with sugar cane being the feedstock from which all of these value added products can be derived. Right now the first spin-off, or the first advantage, as a launch pad would be the production of electricity through the use of bagasse as a fuel for driving the boilers and turbo alternators. And the production of ethanol as a energy source for our fuels for our motor vehicles."
Alfonso Noble,
We have known about the impending sugar crisis from years ago. Are we dragging our feet on this?
Joshua Jadu,
"The answer to that is yes. For example, we knew that from 1990 that something was going to happen in 2006 with respect to the present contract and we have been dragging our feet. The question of our government policies and government policies comes in because of the socio-economic concerns and impact of the sugar industry. You know we are indeed dragging our feet. Time has now caught up with us. It can no longer be business as usual and as a result of that we should hope that before the first cut kicks in 2006/2006 that we would have been far advanced not only in our plans but in fact in implementing those plans."