President Museveni has emphasized the need for sugarcane farmers in the Busoga region to start up small scale juice processing factories.
The president while speaking to journalists at Jinja State lodge on Tuesday evening noted that if farmers teamed up and begun manufacturing juice, it will end their dependency on sugar mills.
“Sugarcane has many byproducts. You team up and start processing juice. All of you shall have financial independence from mill owners who will continue lowering sugarcane prices, because they are operating in raw material surplus,” he said.
In August President Museveni asked farmers in the Busoga region to maximize land use by growing sugarcane on large scale.
He said it was not profitable for people with small pieces of land to grow sugarcane and promised to meet out-growers and farmers’ leaders to find ways of maximizing sugarcane growing in rural areas.
However, the farmers, through their representatives, Busoga Sugarcane Outgrowers Association (BUSGA), on June 29 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to supply their sugarcane to Olepito Sugar Company Limited, in Kenya at Shs150,000 per tonne.
The spokesperson of BUSGA, Godfrey Naitema, said they decided to start exporting sugarcane because the available sugar factories had failed to consume all the cane that was drying in their gardens.
According to reports, on the average, six sugar milling companies in Busoga have installed capacity of crushing between 1,000 to 7,000 tonnes of sugarcane daily.
However, sugarcane production is in excess of 500,000 tonnes annually.
