2004 sugar crop in trouble as TICFA abandons cane weighing scales

CANE FARMERS yesterday put a damper on the future of this year’s sugar cane crop when the Trinidad Islandwide Cane Farm-ers’ Association (TICFA) decided to give up its control of most of the cane-weighing scales. TICFA controls more than 80 percent of the scales, but in a shocking move yesterday, the association informed  the Sugar Manufacturing Company of Trinidad and Tobago (SMCTT) that its 20-year-long control of the weighing scales would cease.

Yesterday, in a last ditch effort to save possible chaos in the crop, SMCTT offered the scales to another cane farming organisation, the newly-formed Cane Farmers’ Association of Trinidad (CFAT). Virgo Consultants Ltd, the company hired by SMCTT to advise on this year’s crop, announced at a press conference yesterday in Couva that TICFA had given up interest in the scales. The scales were managed by TICFA personnel whose functions were to weigh farmer’s cane. The association had formed themselves into a cooperative to manage the scales. Wayne Innis, managing director of Virgo Consultants, told Newsday yesterday that he was informed of TICFA’s withdrawal by the association’s president general Raffique Shah. Innis said he has offered the management of the scales to CFAT.

The firm is to write to that association on Friday with a formal proposal, he added. But CFAT’s general secretary, Dave Persad, said yesterday that his association was not in any position to take over management of the scales “at this eleventh hour.” Persad said that he would recommend that SMCTT re-introduce the Cane Farming Department of the former Caroni (1975) Ltd to take charge of the scales. If the issue with the scales are not ironed out by this week, chaos could result in the weighing and selling of farmers’ cane to the Ste Madeleine Sugar Factory. There are about 7,000 farmers who sell their cane to some 40 cane weighing stations.