The Cuban authorities forecast a production of less than half a million tons of sugar in the next harvestscheduled to start in mid-November and in which only 23 power plants will take part.
The official projection is 455,198 tons of sugar as a result of grinding 6.5 million tons of cane, according to what was reported this Thursday at a government meeting on the subject, reviewed through the website Cubadebate.
This is a figure even lower than that of the previous campaign, whose harvest is considered “the lowest in more than a hundred years” on the Island. On that occasion, 36 mills milled “just over six million tons of cane” and around 480,000 tons of sugar were manufactured, according to data from a previous report.
Looking ahead to the next harvest, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called for the mills that will intervene in the contest to be “efficient” and “have a level of resources that guarantee stable production,” according to the official report. .
Two months ago, the president indicated that the next harvests would have a new approach, and that the 2022-2023 period would be done with the mills that “have more possibilities and more cane”, to produce the sugar that the country needs for its consumption. , refers to the agency EFE.
Now, the president of the state group Azcuba, Julio García Pérez, explained that it is about planning the harvest so that it is “objective, flexible and, although small, with good practices”, concentrating resources in fewer plants to achieve greater efficiency.
According to what was planned, the destination of the production of this harvest will be the family basket —which is sold in a rationed way through the so-called “supply booklet”— and “other consumption of the economy such as tourism, medicines, productions industrial and for export”, refers Cubadebate.
This media outlet also quotes Deputy Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca, in charge of the sugar industry in the government, who said that the authorities hope that this harvest will be “the beginning of the sugarcane recovery in the country.”
In addition, he considered it “essential” that the workers in the sector are aware of the efficiency indicators and the progress of grinding in their plants, and that they “feel that if the plant does not grind their economic results are not going to be good, because it was clarified that this year there will be no more subsidies for losses in the sector”.
The sugar industry was once Cuba’s economic locomotive, but suffered a drastic drop in production starting in the 1990s with the economic crisis that followed the fall of the USSR and the socialist camp in Eastern Europe.
According to review EFECuba had 156 operating factories in 1959, at the triumph of the revolution, which in that year produced 5.6 million tons of sugar. Later, production rose to 8 million tons in the best harvests, recorded between 1970 and 1989.
EFE / OnCuba
