Historic organic sugar crop for harvesting
Stabroek News
July 27, 2002
The Guyana Sugar Corporation (GUYSUCO) is to begin harvesting its first plot of organic sugar cane, being piloted at the Uitvlugt Sugar Estate, on Monday, West Demerara Estates General Manager, Zalil Gafur, said.
Gafur said that the current crop to be harvested from a 124-hectare plot is expected to yield some 500 tonnes of organic sugar from which a factory evaluation will be made.
The success of the current yield has led to the announcement that cultivation will be extended by another 200 hectares for the next crop.
The Uitvlugt pilot is the first of its kind in Guyana and in the Caribbean as well, Gafur said. The harvesting should take just three days.
A GUYSUCO release said that for this year the product will be called ‘organic sugar in conversion’ to meet certification requirements. It is expected that from the year 2003, the product would have full organic sugar certification.
The objective of the pilot is to determine how economically viable the cultivation, yield and production of organic sugar would be.
Uitvlugt Agricultural Manager, Walter Persaud, said, “it was very encouraging to look at canes growing without the use of chemicals.”
Planting the crop organically meant that GUYSUCO did not use any inorganic fertilisers to increase or improve yields; weedicides to control weeds or agro-chemicals for the control of pests. Limestone, a natural fertiliser and manure composts were used.
The land on which cane was grown had not been in use for some 15 years and it had gone into a state of secondary vegetation. Manual and mechanical means were used to control weeds and as GUYSUCO does not use agro-chemical control for pests, that did not pose a problem for the company, Persaud said.
For the processing of the organic sugar, GUYSUCO Agricultural Director, Dr Harold Davis, Jnr had told Stabroek News in an earlier interview that GUYSUCO did not use a number of the aids which were in place for processing regular sugar.
Factory Manager, Albert Katryan, whose area of expertise is processing will be in charge of the operations.
Substantive Factory Manager, Deodat Ompertab, told the GUYSUCO Communications Department that he had spent much of the out-of-crop period seeing that the factory was prepared for the production of organic sugar. “Every part of the factory - all the pipes and tubes and other parts, are absolutely clean and ready for processing,” he said.
Ompertab said that workers were very cooperative and helpful and were ready to face the challenges that might originate from this specialty product.
The GUYSUCO release said that the organic sugar would be produced to capture a “small but special export market in which consumers are willing to pay a premium price for sugar produced void of chemical additives.”
Dr Davis has said that once the corporation was satisfied that it could cultivate sugar by organic means, it would get about marketing the sugar. At present, it is expected that the current organic crop will be sold to a United Kingdom market, he said. Uitvlugt was selected for the pilot project after Britain’s Prince Charles toured GUYSUCO while on a state visit to Guyana in 2000.
Evaluating the production process, Dr Davis had said, would entail looking at the costs involved in the cultivation of the cane and costs of other requirements of the factory.
Brazil, the USA, Mauritius and the Philippines are already producing organic sugar. In Europe, beet sugar is being produced organically.