Brazil Expects Record Sugar Crop

Brazil will harvest a record 633.7 million tons of sugar this year, up 10.7 percent from 2008, the government announced Thursday.

The country this year will also produce unprecedented amounts of refined sugar and sugar-based ethanol, according to figures released by Conab, the Agriculture Ministry’s crop-forecasting agency.

“That proves that the market for sugar and ethanol continues to accelerate despite the economic crisis,” Conab chief Wagner Rossi said in a statement.

Conab attributed the rise in sugar cane production to a 9.9 percent increase in the amount of cropland devoted to it to be able to supply 25 new sugar refineries and plants to produce ethanol, a fuel that is used more heavily than gasoline in Brazil.

Brazil now devotes 7.79 million hectares (19.5 million acres) to sugar cultivation.

According to Conab, of the 61.1 million tons more sugar cane that will be processed this year compared to 2008, 28 million tons of it is production that was left over from last year and that only got to the refineries in 2009.

Conab also announced that while the amount of sugar cane destined for the production of refined sugar will grow this year by 17 percent, while that to be used to manufacture ethanol will only increase by 7.7 percent.

That forecast means that about 37.9 million tons of refined sugar will be produced this year along with a maximum of 28.6 billion liters (about 7.6 billion gallons) of ethanol. In both cases, these will be new production records.

Refined sugar production last year was 31.6 million tons and 26.7 billion liters of ethanol were produced.

Despite the fact that the increase in ethanol production will be just 7.7 percent, Rossi said that the volume will be enough to meet the growing demand for the fuel in Brazil and to increase exports.

Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of sugar-based ethanol.

According to Conab, the current world situation, with oil prices falling and sugar prices rising, provides an incentive for industry to use more sugar cane to produce refined sugar than to make ethanol.

“Today, we export 70 percent of the sugar and about 15 percent of the ethanol. With the appreciation of the dollar against the real, the fall in the Indian harvest and the good international prices for the product, sugar has come to have more attractive remuneration than ethanol,” Conab’s logistics director, Silvio Porto, said. EFE

SOURCE: laht