Shadow

Beltran votes for 100% ‘B,’ laments low production

The representative of the millers on Saturday, August 28, informed his colleagues on the Sugar Board that he is voting to allocate 100 percent of the country’s sugar production for crop year 2021-22 for “B” or the domestic market.

Board Member Roland Beltran said he is disappointed that the yearly production of raw sugar remains stagnant, if not in a declining trajectory, while the annual population growth is increasing in numbers.

Inevitably, the demand for local sugar will outpace the supply denigrating the mandate of SRA “to establish and maintain such balanced relation between production and requirement of sugar and such marketing conditions as well insure stabilized prices at a level reasonably profitable to the producers and fair to consumers,” he said

Sadly, opportunities were lost and squandered because of ineptitude and wrong prioritization, he said.

Among the many problems that beset the sugar industry is that the combined land area planted with sugarcane is fast declining, and there has been no policy and program aggressively pursued to explore and develop land areas suitable for sugarcane plantations, Beltran said.

He said the raw sugar production for the last four years is dismal and unimpressive at 2,083,641 metric tons in 2017-2018; 2,073,911 in 2018-2019; 2,145,693 in 2019-2020; and 2,138,147 in 2020-2021.

“We cannot forever blame the weather (La Niña) for the low production of raw sugar without finding ways on how to reverse the trend and increase it,” he said.

It is lamentable that there has been no significant improvement despite the subsidy from the government through the Sugar Industry Development Act funds, not to mention the corporate funds of SRA that had been disbursed by the millions of pesos, Beltran said.

“If this trend will continue unchecked and undiminished, I can anticipate the bleak and disturbing future of the sugar industry unless measures that are substantial, inclusive and sustainable in nature are immediately put in place,” he said.*

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