And while we caught the PM at the BDF luncheon - which you'll hear about later in the news - earlier today, he was meeting with the BSCFA. The sugar season has already been scheduled to start later than hoped, and the association and BSI are unable to come to an agreement for their contract. BSI suggested a four year agreement, whereas the cane farmers refused to sign for more than one year. And there is also the issue of the Fairtrade money that needs to be sorted out. The PM believes that in order to reach a solution, a compromise must be made.
John Briceno, Prime Minister
"What the BSCFA did is that they now hired Senior Counsel Magali Marin to be able to look at the issues of Fairtrade, that has been an ongoing concern between the BSCFA and BSI. What Senior Counsel Marin was to go through the different agreements and the regulations where they believe that BSI has not been following up or living up to the agreement that they signed, so the idea is now we've asked Senior Counsel to prepare a letter to the Cabinet subcommittee, along with a presentation clearly pointing out where they believe BSI has not been living up to the conditions for the payment of Fairtrade. We're going to send it over to Mac, we hope to get it by Friday, and early next week the expectation is that the Cabinet subcommittee is going to have a meeting with Mac and his officials to discuss it. I am hoping that by addressing that issue then maybe we can get maybe a two year or three year commercial agreement to allow us as a government to give time to have the commission of inquiry. The commission of inquiry is going to take us probably at least a year but once we get that report then we need to be able to study it to see what can be applicable, how is it that we can improve the yields in our cane fields, how we can reduce the cost of delivery to BSI to the factory, how BSI could improve its efficiencies and also the delivery of the sugar from BSI onto the ship for it to be- we need to take a comprehensive look at what's going on and how we can improve the efficiencies and at the end of the day how everybody can make more money."
"Fairtrade is only one part, that is why the idea is that if we could settle that, we could sign an interim agreement for three years and then that will then be able to allow for everybody to look at the facts, look at the evidence that we can get from the commission of inquiry and from then decide what can be changed, what we can do to be able to improve, to make it better for everyone."
