Negros Occidental 5th District Representative Emilio Bernardino Yulo remains hopeful that sugar farming will remain profitable for farmers, especially with the increase in production costs necessitated by the prolonged dry spell.
Yulo issued the statement in light of the opening of the milling season within a couple of weeks, which he hopes would “bring in better prices for our sugar farmers.”
A lot of farms had to double their fertilizer and other inputs to reverse the effects of the El Niño resulting in a much higher production cost than normal, Yulo said.
He said that in the previous crop year, “our farmers suffered from low millgate prices for majority of the milling weeks, and for this crop year, our farmers had to face high production costs.”
The statement was echoed by Hinigaran Mayor Nadie Arceo who said that because of the dry spell, production cost increased by at least 20 percent and “farmers had to replant with the prices of canepoint that doubled.”
Arceo, also the president of Unifarms Inc., a sugar association with more than 3,000 members, where 90 percent are small or marginalized farmers, said “We are looking forward to have a good start this milling season to at least recoup our cost and earn a little profit.”
Yulo said SRA has a big role to play by “managing the supply and demand side well to ensure reasonable returns and profit for our farmers.”
The industry is already losing land planted to sugar to real estate and other developments, and if we want to see an increase in sugar lands and make ourselves sustainable, we need to make sugar farming profitable, especially for small farmers who comprise a big bulk of our producers, Yulo further said.*
