Brazil to produce record 35.5 million tonnes of sugar

Brazil's main center-south sugar cane crop will produce a record 35.5 million tonnes of sugar this 2013/14 season, an increase of 4.1 percent from the 34.1 million tonnes produced last year, sugar and ethanol industry association Unica said on Monday.
Unica projected the cane crop that mills started harvesting this month at a record 589.6 million tonnes, a 10.7 percent increase from the 532.8 million tonnes crushed last year and up from its initial estimate for the current crop in December of 580 million tonnes.
Despite the expectation of record sugar output, the massive cane crop will boost Brazil's production of ethanol most with mills forecast to produce 25.37 billion liters of the biofuel, up 18.8 percent from the 21.36 billion of last season.
The cane crop will likely surpass the previous record year of 2010/11 when mills crushed 556.9 million tonnes, but mills are far behind in crushing this crop compared with where they were at this point in the season three years ago. Wet weather earlier this season raised the chance that mills will not harvest the entire crop of cane before the rainy season sets in December and shuts them down. Earlier this month, analyst Datagro lowered its forecast for this crop's sugar and ethanol output due to the wet, slow start to crushing. Mills had crushed 8.82 million tonnes of cane by April 15, Unica data showed, well behind the 27.7 million tonnes crushed over the same period of the 2010/11 crop.
The quality of the cane so far is better than last season, with mills reporting an average of 136.7 kilograms of recoverable sugars per tonne of cane, up 0.8 percent from the 135.6 kg/T registered on average for the previous crop. In addition to the slow start to crushing, 12 mills that had operated last season may not open this year due to financial fragility in the sugar and ethanol industry, Unica said. Three new mills will begin operations this season, partially offsetting the closures, but that is a far cry from four seasons ago when 30 new mills opened in just one season.