December 9 ,2020
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) on Monday says it expects this year’s sugar production to close at 89,000 metric tonnes (MT).
This will be under the disappointing 90, 246 MT that had been achieved last year and which had been the lowest production in the industry since 1926.
Production as December 6th this year was 85,531 MT and the company in a release said it is on course to achieve 89,000 MT before the crop closes in two weeks.
Uitvlugt Estate, one of the three operational estates has meanwhile concluded its production for the second crop of 2020 with a total of 18,599.4 MT as of December 6, 2020. This figure is also below the 20,270 MT achieved in 2019.
Estate Manager Yudhisthira Mana said in the release that while Uitvlugt experienced several challenges as a result of inclement weather during the latter part of the crop and in the factory due to a lack of timely access to spare parts, employees of the Estate must be commended for working diligently to harvest all of the available sugar cane. This has resulted in no cane being carried over into the First Crop of 2021.
The Uitvlugt Estate cultivates and manages a total of 6,006 Hectares of sugar cane. Of this figure several members of the Private Cane Farmers’ Association control 1,750 Hectares.
In outlining the challenges of the second crop, Mana informed that as a result of the massive factory downtime earlier in the crop (some 430 hours mainly due to lack of spares), sugar cane grinding was stalled for more than eight days which impacted the tonnes cane to tonnes sugar ratio (tc/ts).
However, all technical issues are actively being addressed going forward with the support of $3 billion in capital investments from the government. In 2021, there will be a continuation of these capital investments, the release said.
During the latter stage of harvesting, sugar production at the estate was also threatened due to the inclement weather that prevailed resulting in the fields being flooded.
At present, Uitvlugt Estate employs a total of 1,403 workers, the release said.