And to help keep the cane farmers honest, the Sugar Cane Production Committee and the Factory Owners have collaborated to set up an accounting system called, SIMIS, or Sugar Industry Management Information System. Apart from accountability, it has a direct benefit to farmers, because they are able to accurately take stock of how much cane they actually have in their fields.
It's a system that the regulators and the Sugar Industry Research and Development Institute worked on in a pilot project last year, and this year, they are rolling it out all the sugar cane farmers. They are hoping that they will willingly participate to allow for accurate data illustrating how much cane was actually under production.
Here's what the coordinator of the SIMIS told us about the program, what it does:
Jessamyn Ramos, Coordinator - SIMIS
"SIMIS is a tool that the sugar industry stakeholders have identified necessary for us to make more informed decisions. The sugar industry for many years has been lacking precise information in terms of increase production, so the SIMIS, what the first portion of the SIMIS has done, is we have captured the parcels under production. That means that we use satellite imagery, GPS to go and collect this information. We now have that one piece of information which is the majority of the sugar cane parcels under production and currently we are looking at approximately 77,000 acres. The industry has been using an estimate of 60,000 for many years. But now we can now pin down exactly how much acres we might have or an estimate more closely to the reality."
"What the SIMIS is doing and the sugar industry have decided to implement it, to monitor the production. So, now we have all the sugar cane under production. We have the acreages, but what we don't have is the yield. So what we are doing this crop is that we are providing farmers with a copies of their maps and these maps have attached to it unique parcel number and the acreage for each parcel. At the end of the crop, we could pin exactly how much tons came out of each parcel and calculate based on the acreage calculate their yield which is the tons cane per acre. Over the weekend we were out visiting each harvesting group as they are preparing to harvest their cane and trying to sell to them the benefits of it first. We believe that majority of them are responding positively, because they are seeing the benefits and we are hoping that through the course of the crop, we are going to get the other farmers to want to participate in it. Because at the end of the day, they are the biggest beneficiaries of the system."
If the cane farmers participate, they will be given a ticketing system which allows the SIMIS coordinators to carefully track where the cane is coming from. The data gathered at the end of the crop will allow SIRDI to properly inform the farmers about their cane per acre output, so that they can advise the farmer how to improve their farming practices to increase production. That's important because of the change in the EU market which take place in October 2017.
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