The industry that once led Cuba’s economy, sugar, is back with a goal: to recover its position at the top. For centuries sugar has been the power horse of Cuban economy and a key element in the Cuban identity.
However, this year the harvest, which began on the Matanzas Jesus Rabbi mill, has different shades that bring hope of a potential recovery of that industry.
First, the Cuban sugar industry has just opened to foreign investment for the first time in over half a century, with the arrival of the Brazilian Works and Infrastructure Company (IOC).
In early November, during the XXX Havana International Trade Fair (FIHAV 2012), the State Business Group AZCUBA, heir to the defunct Ministry of Sugar, and IOC signed a contract for the management for 13 years of the 5 de Septiembre mill, in the Cienfuegos province, about 226 kilometers southeast of Havana.
During the harvest that just started, IOC will manage the refinery, that in recent years has produced between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of sugar per season, but that modernization is intended to achieve, for the coming years, a recovery of its original factory capacity of up to 90,000 tons, and increasing yield to an average of 65 tons per hectare.
Also during FIHAV, the British Havana Energy Ltd company and Zerus SA, a company belonging to AZCUBA, signed an investment agreement to build a plant capable of generating 30 megawatts of electricity from bagasse and marabou, the latter a shrub that populates the fields of the island.
To build the first plant in areas surrounding the Ciro Redondo sugar mill in the central province of Ciego de Avila, both entities formed a joint venture which is responsible for the construction of four other similar facilities that will be placed in other regions of the country.
The plant should start generating electricity in early 2015, and will be fed with sugarcane bagasse from a sugar factory nearby, during the harvest season, and Marabou the rest of the year.
In this harvest, which will run for 166 days until April, Cuba expects to have 50 sugar mills working (four more than in the previous one), of which 24 will start in December, 21 in January and three in February, in order to achieve an increase in sugar production of 20 percent compared with the results of the previous harvest.
According to estimates, this harvest could exceed productivity and performance of the previous year, which was below expectations, but was the best harvest of the last eight years in Cuba, growing sugar production by 16 percent and lowering cost per ton.
Among the issues of the campaign were the low utilization of manufacturing capacity, the late start of 21 of the 46 mills involved in the grinding and high levels of breaks and interruptions in the work industry.
AZCUBA specialists estimate that sugar production would be the highest in the last nine years, whose productions were kept in the range close to one million tonnes per year.
AZCUBA hopes to reverse the long decline in sugar production, which has been falling gradually from 8 million tons in 1990, and plans to produce 2.4 million tons by 2015.
This state agency has proposed to put to work another 10 sugar mills by 2015, update their technology, enhance yields and payment systems to farmers and apply efficient management mechanisms that allow self-financing.
At the recent Congress of the Association of Cuban Sugar Technicians (ATAC), AZCUBA VP, Morell Wilson, said that the expected growth ranges between 15 and 20 percent annually from the current harvest.
Morell said they imported 27 harvesters and expect to increase them to 100 this year, equipment that come from Brazil, a country that gave Cuba a credit of 200 million dollars for agricultural machinery, according to news reports.
AZCUBA now develops a new model of in the sugar industry based on economic efficiency and production, integrated management and control systems, the use of new technologies and the implementation of "precision agriculture".
Authorities are also boosting a modernization program of the sugar industry, which includes changing the old Cuban KTP harvester, which uses Soviet technology for more efficient Brazilian machines.
In early August last year, in a parliamentary session that discussed the economic situation in the first six months of 2011, President Raul Castro said they had succeeded in stopping "the deterioration of the production of sugar."
The truth is that the sugar industry seems to have found the road to recovery, a complicated way, but they can move more quickly with the arrival of foreign investment that brings technology, market and especially the necessary capital.
Hopefully then this harvest, which began in a different fashion, will also bring different productive results in favor of an economy struggling to update its model.
Author
Raúl Menchaca
