CLARKS TOWN, Trelawny – Chairman of the All Island Jamaica Cane Farmers’ Association Allan Rickards has instructed the more than 200 cane farmers in Trelawny and St James not to sell their cane to the Long Pond Sugar Company, until a transportation subsidy that was introduced three years ago is reinstated.

Up to three years ago, the farmers were selling their cane to the Hampden Sugar estate, but following the closure of the estate’s processing plant in 2002, a subsidy was introduced to compensate farmers for the additional transportation costs associated with transporting the product to the Long Pond processing plant.

At the time of the closure, cane farmers were also given the option to transport their cane to a hoist at Hampden, where it would be cored and later transported, at the expense of the Trelawny Sugar Company, to the Long Pond processing plant.

But after one year, the farmers and the management decided to abandon that system, following complaints from farmers that the arrangement was causing them to incur losses.

However, Rickards, in an interview with the Observer last week, insisted that the cane farmers would not be delivering any cane to Long Pond unless the subsidy is in place and called for a meeting with the Sugar Industry Authority (SIA), the body set up by government to regulate the sector.

“We won’t sell any cane to the factory,” Rickards stressed. “It is either Long Pond pay the subsidy, and if they don’t, farmers will not deliver their cane.”

He added that he would be leading a delegation, which includes members of the Hampden Cane Farmers’ Association, to a meeting with the executive chairman for the SIA, Ambassador Derrick Heaven, later this week to make their position known.

The farmers have long argued that even with the subsidy, they have been suffering huge financial losses, since the closure of the Hampden processing plant.

Hampden was closed in 2002 as the government moved to stem the financial haemorrhaging that had left $1.6 billion in debt.

Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke said at that time that the state had already spent $100 million to keep the factory afloat and explained that it would take another $100 million to process the 2002/2003 sugar cane harvest.

The farmers, who once supplied their cane to Hampden, said they lost in excess of $18 million in revenue during the 2004/ 2005 crop because they were unable to take their crop off the ground.

“They (the farmers) have been taking licks left, right and centre and so they just can’t take anymore,” Rickards argued.

Aldane Barnett, one of the farmers who has been selling cane to the Long Pond processing plant since the closure of the Hampden factory, estimated that he and his peers have lost more than $90 million over the last three years.

Since the start of the 2005/2006 crop, Barnett said, he has delivered 550 tonnes of cane to Long Pond, but with the additional cost of trucking the cane to the factory, he is unlikely to make a profit.

According to Barnett, transportation costs alone have accounted for more than $163,000 of the estimated $1 million he is to receive for his cane.

“Apart from the transportation costs, I have to pay $300.00 per tonne for cutting the cane, $80.00 (per tonne) for loading so when you take other factors into account concerning the growing of the cane, I am not making any money,” the cane farmer argued.

He said he would not harvest his remaining 500 tonnes of cane this season, if the subsidy is not reinstated.

“If dem don’t give us back the subsidy, I prefer to make di cane stay there (in the fields),” he said.

The farmers in the region have an estimated 30,000 tonnes of cane, valued at $60 million, to be harvested this crop.