News
15.12.2009
Ukraine aims to boost sugar production in 2010
Ukraine plans to encourage farmers to increase the 2010 sugar beet area by 37 percent and to boost white sugar output to 2.5 million tonnes from 1.37 million in 2009, a deputy farm minister was quoted as saying on Monday. Ukraine, which consumes about 2.0 million tonnes of sugar per year, used to produce about 5.0 million tonnes of white sugar from sugar beet in Soviet times, but cut production because it was unable to compete with much cheaper sugar made from cane.
"Our task is to create conditions to boost the sugar beet sowing area to 450,000 hectares in 2010...to harvest 18 million tonnes of beet and to produce 2.5 million tonnes of sugar," Kommersant daily quoted Ivan Demchak as saying. He said the 2009 sugar beet crop was likely to total 10.3 million tonnes and white sugar production from beet could be at 1.37 million.
In 2008 Ukraine produced 1.6 million tonnes of sugar from sugar beet. Last week producers said refineries had produced 1.23 million tonnes of white sugar from the 2009 beet crop as of December 10, or 18.3 percent less than at the same date in 2008. Demchak said a shortage of sugar in Ukraine in the 2009/10 season could total 440,000 tonnes and the gap would be covered by imports of 543,000 tonnes of raw cane sugar.
Reuters
