It’s a pathetic picture of the early 1980s when, at the height of the sugar industry debacle, severe child malnutrition gripped the western Visayan island, traditio-nally known as the Philippines’ sugar bowl.
Back then, thousands of wor-kers had lost their jobs from sugar mill closures due to declining su-gar prices, soaring interest rates as high as 38 percent, and unfavo-rable business climate following a move by a Marcos crony to estab-lish a sugar monopoly.
Today, a rather vibrant mood permeates the air over sugarlandia.
In the sugar milling districts of Bais and La Carlota in Negros Oc-cidental as well as those in Ormoc and Kananga in Western Leyte, farm-to-central roads are being built and widened to make way for large sugarcane-carrying vehicles.
In the cities of Sagay and Silay, also in Negros Occidental, new tractors and modern farm imple-ments acquired through govern-ment assistance are replacing the carabao for plowing, providing better land preparation and assuring higher productivity that benefit even small tillers.
Sugar farmers in Kabankalan and Bago have begun improving their irrigation and drainage facilities while old mills in Pampanga, Batangas, Cebu, Negros Occidental, Leyte and Bukidnon have embarked on a plant moder-nization program enabling them to install new boilers, shredders, mill rollers, pollution abatement equipment and other facilities.
After languishing for two de-cades, the sugar industry is slowly getting back on its feet. And this time around, its various stakehol-ders are putting their act together in a bid not only to regain lost glory but also to elevate the indus-try to world-class standards able to withstand the onslaught of trade liberalization.
The tell-tale signs of recovery are becoming evident.
For one, total output hit a nine-year high of 1.89 million metric tons in crop year 2001-2002 ending Aug. 31, and production in the current crop year is projected to increase anywhere from 1.95 million to two million MT.
The improvement is largely due to higher productivity as a re-sult of farmers’ increasing use of high-yielding varieties. This al-lows sugar centrals to recover 1.8 50-kilo bag of raw sugar for every ton of sugarcane milled (Lkg/tc), compared to the previous year’s level of 1.71 Lkg/tc.
The new strains, developed by both Philippine Sugar Research Institute Foundation (Philsurin) and the Sugar Regulatory Admi-nistration, can yield an average of 213.64 bags per hectare, more than twice that of traditional varieties which produce an average of 94.4 bags of sugar per hectare.
From about 36,000 hectares planted to HYV in 1998 – a tenth of the country’s total sugarcane area of 360,000 hectares, the area planted to the new strains has risen to 126,000 has at present, representing an expansion to 35 percent of the total.
"There’s no doubt production growth is fueled by farmers in-creasing use of HYVs which provide higher sugar content that results in better sugar recovery," SRA administrator James Ledes-ma told PAJ News and Features.
Due to higher output, the coun-try has continued to supply 137,000 metric tons of sugar to the United States worth $66.4 million, representing its 13.5-percent share of the total US sugar import quota.
With the US supply contract intact, local millers and farmers have benefited from the higher sugar price offered by the quota deal, which ranged from 18 to 20 US cents per pound, as against world market price of between seven to eight cents per lb.
But more than the increased output and higher yield, a more apparent sign of recovery at the field level is the rising income of small farmers because prices of sugar at millgate have been stable during the last two years.
The average weighted farm-gate price of sugarcane has brown 9.72 percent to 79 centavos per kilogram in 2002, sustaining the 7.46 price growth recorded a year earlier, Bureau of Agricultural Statistics figures show.
As the industry struggles to get back on its feet, various stake-holders admit government assis-tance, in the form of a P602.7 mil-lion Sugar Agricultural Competi-tiveness Enhancement Fund (ACEF) infused during the last two years, has greatly helped in the sector’s recovery effort.
Some P325 million from the fund had been used for farm mechanization including pur-chase of tractors, another P167.7 million to research and develop-ment and extension, P99.7 million to productivity improvement measures, and P10.2 million for mill improvement.
The investment climate with the sugar industry has likewise improved substantially to the extent that more farmers have, on their own, started buying brand new and reconditioned tractors.
For their part, leaders in the industry who viewed themselves in the past as business competitors, have united for the greater good, estab-lishing an environment of coope-ration that promotes development.
From all indications, the sugar industry is on the road to recovery. And as the popular ditty goes, "this time it’ll be sweeter." — PAJ News and Features.