New Support Program Boosts Belize’s Sugar Industry

Belize’s sugar industry is feeling the strain, with higher costs, lower yields and climate pressures driving many cane farmers away. Now, the Belize Sugar Industry is stepping in with AgGrowPro, a new support program aimed at helping growers rebuild through better farm management, technical assistance and mechanization. As longtime family farms sit abandoned and farmers turn to other sectors, BSI’s Country Manager Mac McClachlan says the company is ready to help rescue struggling operations. Prime Minister John Briceño has welcomed the initiative, urging farmers to take advantage of the program, which industry leaders say could help stabilize sugar production and protect livelihoods.

 

Mac McClachlan, Country Manager, BSI

“Ideally what we’d like to do is to help the farmers to improve their own viability and we can do that through AgGrowPro. We can do that and there’s potential for us to lease land as well from farmers. It’s very disappointing to see the number of cane fields that have just been abandoned. Now some have gone outta cane altogether, moved into cattle. That’s fine if that’s what, if that’s what farmers want to do. But I see out there a lot of shabby cane, as we call it, very low yield cane is not gonna be cut because nobody will go and cut. And that’s a real travesty ’cause that’s just a waste of land and it’s a waste of effort that people are putting into it. So, yes in answer to your question, we are more than happy to help farmers in a range of different ways. We can AgGrowPro those fields. That’s the farmers get seven years to repay that amount of money during which time they’ll benefit from the increased cane productivity on that field.”

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“It’s a wonderful and a great program. They don’t manage. What they do is they go in and they replant your fields properly. As we know, the sugar industry is going through a complete transformation that we have to move from cutting cane by hand manually to mechanized. And to do that now we have to have longer rows and flat. We can’t be having the mount. You have to be flat with a slope so the water can run out. And so that’s what we’re doing.”