FSC urges farmers to plant on fallow land

THE Fiji Sugar Corporation is encouraging all cane growers to utilise their fallow land and plant new cane in a bid to help salvage the sugar industry.

Corporation chairman Gautam Ramswarup said the 6000 hectares of land they hoped would be planted with new cane was with the growers but not utilised fully.

"We want to bring this land for cane production," he said.

"These are not new land, the land is already there. They are the idle land within the cane farms."

There are short-fallow land which have been idle for less than a year, and long-fallow land which have been idle for years.

Mr Ramswarup said it was important that the farmers utilised all their land in the new season.

He said by utilising the 6000 hectares of fallow land, sugar cane harvest was expected to increase to 2.6 million tonnes in the 2011 season.

He said production in recent years had declined to levels that threatened the very existence of the Fiji Sugar Corporation.

Mr Ramswarup said that production over the past three years had remained at 2.35 million tonnes of cane, and that the launch of the cane replanting program was expected to improve productivity in the sugar industry.

The replanting program is designed to take the sugar cane crop to four million tonnes by 2014.

source: fijitimes