It's affecting a large number of cane crops and Marcos Osorio, the Director, of the Sugar Industry Research & Development Institute told CTV-3 more about it.

Marcos Osorio, Director, SIRDI
"Well the thing with the cane industry is that we thought that the problem was over with the drought but now are facing another challenge, which is the problem with what we call the defoliator worm, we call it a few things but cane farmers will understand defoliator worm. It eats the cane leaves and the leaves of the grass. In the last three or four weeks we've been receiving reports from cane farmers telling us that they are having worm problems in their crops. So last week we decided to do an evaluation of the situation and went to all the areas in the course of a few days and realized that all the areas are in more or less a bad state, but overall it's a situation that the cane farmer and the leaders of our industry need to keep in mind to see how we can implement a plan of action. Even though we know that cane farmers are carrying out and implementing measures we think that we have to attack in a systematic manner with widespread participation so that we don't end up in the situation we were in, in years gone by, where some producers did their part and others didn't. So this is a plague that we've seen in other years but this year it's a bit atypical because we're seeing greater incidence of infestations."

We'll keep following this story.