Ministry to work with stakeholders to help the sugar sector
MINISTER for Sugar Charan Jeath Singh says the Sugar industry is basically insolvent.
While speaking to Nadi business owners recently, he said their ministry was planning to revive the industry by increasing production levels.
“To be honest, FSC is insolvent and the industry is insolvent,” he said.
“The government has been pouring millions after millions of dollars into the industry over the years just to keep the industry surviving.
“There has been mismanagement.
“There is been a lot of corruption in the industry and when people were cleaning out the industry of corruption, apparently the last government was trying to suppress this information.”
He said their ministry would work with current and new stakeholders to help the industry.
“We are not on a witch hunt.
“We are there to be inclusive and we want the industry to run.
“The sugar industry is here to stay because if we close the industry, the 200,000 people who depend on the sugar industry, where will they go?
“So we will make sure that it happens and that it goes back to its glory days.”
He added that the last government had reduced production levels of sugar.
“In the good times during the Ratu Mara government, we had 3.2million tonnes of cane produced in this country which translated to 350,00tonnes of sugar.
“We had surplus of sugar.
“We had enough sugar to give it to our European market then we had enough sugar to sell to Korea, Japan, US and New Zealand.
“Today, our production has dropped from 3.2million to 1.6milliontonnes.
“Our cost of operations of the industry is still the same but our production has gone down. One thing we would like to do is increase our production.”