Environmental issues affect cane harvesting
ENVIRONMENTAL issues negatively impacted cane harvesting for growers in 2020, says Fiji Sugar Corporation board chairman Vishnu Mohan.
“FSC was affected by the damage caused by Tropical Cyclone Sarai that led to a decline in the crop harvest to 1,806,572 tonnes against a pre-crush estimate of 1,850,650 tonnes,” Mr Mohan said.
“Furthermore, due to unfavourable changes to the weather patterns, sugarcane quality dropped critically, impacting the sugar market for the year.
“As a consequence, there was a negative impact on the tonnes cane to tonnes sugar ratio for the year.”
He said more than $31 million was also invested in the improvement of the three sugar mills.
“The board approved targeted capital investments for major equipment upgrades and refurbishment at all three mills which included works on juice stabilisation systems, acquisition of new centrifugal, 1.6MW diesel generators, rotary vacuum filters and the reinstallation of the 12MW TG set at Lautoka and 10MW TG set at Labasa respectively.
“These upgrades assisted in improving and stabilising operations at the mills in 2019.”
Outgoing FSC chief executive officer Graham Clark said about $9 million of the investment was spent on the Lautoka sugar mill.
“We spent nearly $9 million improving the quality of air emissions coming out of the factory and that was a great benefit to the residents of Lautoka and at the same time, it improved the efficiency of the boiler,” Mr Clark said.
“Using that, we were able to generate electricity which we were able to export into the EFL grid and Lautoka alone earned more than $2 million from our exports.
“We also invested in specific areas in the factory, the cane carriers and things that help us with performance going forward.
“We have to be very careful in what we spend and it has to be spent in the right place, to do the right thing and we get the right result.
“The fact that our factories operated better than the last four or five years and we were 20 per cent down on stops this year proves that sort of philosophy works for us.”