WESTERN BUREAU — With another disappointing crop at the Long Pond Sugar factory in Trelawny, the Sugar Company of Jamaica (SCJ) is to send a technical team to the factory next week to design a maintenance programme for the problem-plagued facility.

Chief executive officer at the SCJ, Livingstone Morrison, told the Observer that as soon as the team’s work is completed, steps will be taken to put the necessary measures in place to make the factory more efficient.

“I am expecting a detailed report on the factory because I am very dissatisfied and disappointed with the performance there,” Morrison told the Observer.

During the just-concluded 2003 crop, the factory produced a mere 10,400 tonnes of sugar from the manufacture of 141,144 tonnes of cane.

This represents a marginal increase of 600 tonnes over the amount produced at the factory during the previous crop.

Prior to the start of the 2003 season, management had set itself a target of 13,500 tonnes but the figure was later revised downwards to 12,500 tonnes.

The SCJ’s boss said that this year’s less-than-stellar performance was due mainly to mechanical problems at the state-run facility.

“We had major problems with the generators, the boilers, carrier and cranes,” Morrison noted.

Just before the start of the 2003, crop which ended on Wednesday, Morrison told the Observer that the SCJ was spending just over $40 million to carry out repairs at the factory, in preparation for the crop.

He said, then, that the company was spending a lot of money to sort out the electrical problems that plagued the 2002 crop, by purchasing new generators. Major works, he said, would also be carried out on the cranes and boilers.

But, an official at the Long Pond told the Observer that during the 2003 crop, the factory lost a considerable amount of production time because of faulty machinery.

While agreeing that the crop was poor, chairman of the Long Pond/Vale Royal Cane Farmers Association, Delroy Anderson, said a lack of a proper organisation, in particular with the “Hampden situation”, played a major role in the factory being unable to achieve its desired target.

Last December, Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke announced in Parliament the closure of the Hampden Sugar factory and said that the cane that was processed at Hampden would now be processed at Long Pond.

Anderson contended that the government, after closing the Hampden factory, did not do enough to assist the farmers who were selling cane to Hampden.

“Little or nothing was done to help those farmers in getting their canes to Long Pond,” he maintained.

And George Fray, who represents cane farmers in the Hampden area, said farmers have lost thousands of dollars because of the inability of Long Pond to process their canes.

According to Fray, farmers in his area have reported that they were unable to reap more than 2,500 tonnes of canes during the crop.

Fray has long called for the re-opening of the Hampden sugar factory. He has consistently argued that the Long Pond sugar factory is not capable of manufacturing all the canes in Trelawny and St James.