Cashew exports hit hard on high operation cost, competition: Icra
Dryness cuts crop for world's largest sugarcane
plant in Brazil
September 13, 2018
The world’s largest sugarcane
processing plant, a Brazilian mill able to process 10 million tonnes per year,
has recorded a drop in cane crushing for the second consecutive season because
of excessive dryness in Sao Paulo state, an executive said on Thursday.Brazil’s
center-south, the world’s largest cane growing region, will likely have a
smaller crop this year for the fourth consecutive year. Besides the weather,
analysts blame factors including financially-troubled companies reducing
investment.
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But the owner of the mill, Sao
Paulo-listed Sao Martinho SA , is one of the few companies in the Brazilian
sugar industry that has stayed in the black, having reported profits for almost
every quarter in the last four years, while maintaining normal levels of cane
field renovation and crop care.The mill’s cane crushing capacity will fall
primarily because of drier soil caused by less rain, and contributing to a smaller
crop, the executive said.“It has been like that for the last four years or so -
drier,” said Mário Ortiz Gandini, the head of Agriculture and Technology at Sao
Martinho SA, which owns the mill in the municipality of Pradópolis, Ribeirão
Preto region.Gandini hopes the dryness is not a permanent trend, he told
Reuters on the sidelines of an event organized by machine maker CASE IH
[CNHCN.UL] to present a new cane harvester.“I prefer to believe that this is
temporary. I don’t think it is a new pattern,” Gandini said.
The Sao Martinho executive said
that temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean, which drive the climate
phenomenon known as El Niño and La Niña, are impacting rain levels and are
likely to blame for the dryness. The company uses data measuring Pacific Ocean
temperatures to plan forward operations, he said.The average cane production in
the 135,000 hectares around the Usina Sao Martinho in Pradópolis is likely to
reach 85 tonnes per hectare in the current season, Gandini said - down from 90
tonnes per hectare in the previous crop and a historic average of 95 tonnes per
hectare.Gandini said the center-south region’s fields were experiencing
below-average rains and next year’s production will depend on rains from
October to February.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/art
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