JAMAICA missed out on a whopping US$432 million by failing to meet its quota and take advantage of favourable conditions under the preferential sugar protocol with the European Union, a sugar official said.

“If we had produced more, if we were more efficient, if we had dealt with the flooding and the extra rains earlier, all of us would have been better off today,” lamented Karl James, who runs Jamaica Cane Products and heads the Sugar Association of the Caribbean (SAC).

James said Jamaica produced just over half of the 280,000 tons it had guaranteed markets for in Europe and at home and could have earned another US$432 million arising from windfall profits resulting from favourable trading of the Euro vis-à-vis the US dollar.

To do that, the island would have had to meet the 167,000 tons Europe said it would buy under the long-standing Lome trade and aid pact between Europe and its present and former colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

James brought the sour news in a presentation to a joint Bustamante Industrial Trade Union/National Workers Union and University and Allied Workers Union (BITU/NWU/UAWU) Sugar Industry Delegates Seminar at the Golf View Hotel in Mandeville last week. The seminar also heard presentations from a number of leading figures in the industry and the trade union movement, including UAWU head, Professor Trevor Munroe.

James’ comments came against the backdrop of rumblings by trade unionists and workers that the already beleaguered industry could be bracing itself for redundancies and other fallout arising from the bad crop and low earnings, as well as the looming removal of the preferential trading arrangement with the EU.

Under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) regime, preferential arrangements between countries must be abandoned to allow for free trade. The Lome pact is one such.

Speaking as chairman of SAC, the body responsible for determining the price paid to the local industry, James also brought news that the current sugar price would go to $27,900 per ton and $2,440 per ton for molasses.

Looking at the future of the sugar industry, he said Jamaica would have to get back into the business of refining sugar if it were to earn more from the industry, and he advised the Government to facilitate interested investors.

“I say to the Government, ‘if you don’t have a refinery in Jamaica you won’t make money. Everybody knows you don’t make anything from producing a raw product’,” he stated.

He pointed to the value-added benefits that could be derived from producing “gourmet sugar products” and “fancy molasses”, as well as the production of more rum from the industry.

In his address, Professor Munroe observed that while some sugar producers in the region such as Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Cuba were not doing well, other countries like Guyana and Belize were succeeding because they paid workers better and used more modern processes. He named Appleton Estate, now primarily producing rum, as one Jamaican success story.

But he noted that the workers in the Jamaican sugar industry had already borne the brunt of the sacrifices needed to make the industry more profitable, citing the reduction in the sugar workforce from 10,000 to some 6,000 today.

Senator Munroe charged that while the unions and the Government were making efforts to improve the quality of life for sugar workers, they were often frustrated by needless bureaucracy. Pointing to the lengthy approval process for sugar workers’ housing schemes in Bell Rock, New Yarmouth, Appleton, Frome, Monymusk and others, he observed that in some instances “it took us 30 months to get a subdivision approval from the parish council for something that should take three-and-a-half months… the Water Commission approval took nine months”.

He said the country would have to become a more efficient producer if sustainable gains were to be made and warned that the industry would probably have “to get slimmer” and continue the positive trend by further reducing its production costs, now hovering at just over 20 cents per pound, down from 30 cents a few years ago.