Ill- informed Senator neglects sugar realities

YOUR Voice of the North ( TB, 14/ 9), presenting NSW Senator David Leyonhjelm’s attack on the Sugar Industry Code of Conduct just shows how ill- informed this senator is.

Cane is paid for according to its analysed CCS ( Commercial Cane Sugar) and marketing related sugar values.

Different marketers have been shown to achieve very different outcomes for the sugar entrusted to them by the growers.

This is technically possible because of the assumptions around how CCS is determined.

For the 2015 and 2016 seasons when growers had a choice for cane pricing purposes of selecting a Wilmar or QSL managed sugar pool, the pool pricing outcomes were starkly different with QSL outperforming the Wilmar managed pool. For 2015, QSL was ahead by $ 30 per tonne of IPS sugar and for the 2016 season, QSL was ahead by $ 79 per tonne.

The partial payment on delivery of cane that Senator Leyonhjelm mentions is more typically around 60 to 65 per cent of the estimated final sugar value unless the grower wishes to select a higher percentage for which a finance charge applies.

The final prices are typically not realised until about July in the year after the season when the cane is delivered and processed.

Marketers typically hold as much sugar as they can in the industry funded sugar terminal storage sheds to deliver against the March and May contracts that tend to be more remunerative.

Senator Leyonhjelm neglects to mention that all sugar mills enjoy a monopoly regarding their cane supply as a beneficial legacy of the earlier regulated era; and that some such as Wilmar have major conflicts of interest with their other associated interests in refineries, shipping and sugar trading to mention a few.

Mills such as Wilmar caused the greatest upheaval in mill owner/ grower relations in recent history by cancelling cane supply agreements and denying growers a choice of marketer with their own collective Cane Supply Agreement until less than a week before the commencement of the 2017 season.

This has caused untold misery for growers. MICHAEL PISANO, Chairman of Directors, Canegrowers Herbert River.