SUGAR PRICES DOWN 50% OVER LAST TWO YEARS
Clewiston, FL – (U S Sugar Release) October 1, 2013—U.S. Sugar began its 83rd annual sugarcane harvesting and processing season at 4 am today with harvest operations in Palm Beach, Hendry and Glades counties. The Clewiston Sugar Factory began processing the first railcars of cane at noon. Both the harvesting and processing operations run 24/7 during the sugarcane harvest season that runs through early April.
“We’ve been flooded both with rainfall and subsidized Mexican sugar,” said Judy Sanchez, senior director of corporate communications and public affairs. “The results are both a smaller crop and sugar prices that have dropped 50% in the last two years.”
Sanchez said that U.S. Sugar expects to produce about seven million tons of sugarcane, harvesting approximately 6.54 million tons of sugarcane for processing at the Clewiston Sugar Factory. U.S. Sugar also delivers contracted cane to the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida and Florida Crystal’s mills. The Clewiston Refinery is projected to produce 14.4 million hundred-weight of refined sugar (720,000 tons) of refined sugar.
For the 2012-13 crop, U.S. Sugar produced 7.43 million tons of sugarcane, with 6.73 million tons of that processed in Clewiston, producing approximately 770,000 tons of raw sugar and 40 million gallons of molasses.
“The United States has become the favorite dumping ground for unneeded, subsidized Mexican sugar—a significant portion produced at government-owned factories,” Sanchez said. “Our farms and factory can produce sugar more cheaply and more efficiently than Mexico, but we cannot compete with Mexican government operations that set records for sugar exports this year.”
U.S. Sugar’s state-of-the-art sugar milling and refining operations make its Clewiston Sugar Factory the world’s largest fully integrated and automated cane sugar processing facility. All of the company’s refined sugar products are marketed by United Sugars, a marketing cooperative that includes U.S. Sugar and beet sugar farmers and processors American Crystal Sugar and Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative located in Minnesota and North Dakota.
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