(Published in MTimes 22 March 2019)
At a workshop recently on the agricultural sector at the Labourdonais hotel , the representative of the Ministry of Finance in his presentation showed that the sugar sector has been declining since 2010. The sugar sector, previously of fundamental importance to the Mauritian economy, has become very "inefficient" very much depending on the financial support from government for its survival.
And for years , budgets after budgets, guided by their short termism, the authorities have kicked the can down the road, wasting precious government resources in the process .They preferred to sweep the issues under the carpet with short term measures and the usual promises like the one made to planters to set up an Agricultural Land Management System or to bring unutilised abandoned cane lands of small planters under productive use or with measures like providing an additional revenue of Rs 1,820 per tonne of sugar for planters producing up to 60 tonnes of sugar or even the introduction and adoption of drone technology ,the use of biomass such as cane trash and woodchips and the waiving of registration duty payable on leases of agricultural lands of up to 10 hectares. What kind of costing was carried out by the MOF in proposing these measures when they knew very well that the decaying sugar sector was “un secteur très inefficace”?
Again with the plunging world sugar prices, Government unveiled a series of short-term measures in support of the planters. They knew very well that these were not sustainable. Besides the agreement with China for the export of some 50,000 tons of special sugars, the government did not have a consistent rescue package for the sector and, most important of all, none of the measures were based on long-term considerations. The Ministerial Committee set up to assess the situation in the cane industry and
to come up with an appropriate action plan for to meet its challenges has been adjourned to the Greek kalends. Lindsay Rivière in a recent interview hits the nail right on the head when he sums it thus :”It seems that now Mauritius is abandoning long-term planning for short-term policies and that’s a bad sign for us. Wherever we look now, it’s always patching up things here and there. We are still under four per cent growth.”
After years of patching up, the MOF suddenly wakes up from its torpor and decides we must now plan for an alternative to sugar. Something that should have been done years back if they had been able to overcome their short termism to have a longer term perspective.
