Brazil's main sugar cane belt makes early start to harvest

Brazil's main center-south sugar cane belt is making an early start to the crushing season, which promises to be a race against rains for mills to harvest the expected record crop, the industry association Unica said on Wednesday. Crushing has reached a record 603.6 million tonnes of cane in the final month of what is technically the 2015/2016 season. Although Unica has not issued a formal estimate of the new crop, it is expected to be at least 5 percent bigger due to healthy rains in the cane belt, analysts have said.
Unica is expected to publish a new forecast in April. Unica said 75 mills were crushing by the first half of March, even though the season officially kicks off on April 1. Two weeks ago, 23 mills in the center-south were crushing. Unica estimates that 120 mills are expected to be operating by the end of March. Brazil's sugar output reached 139,900 tonnes in the first half of March in the region that accounts for 90 percent of Brazil's cane output, up from 2,600 tonnes in the same fortnight a year ago and 14,100 tonnes in late February.
Ethanol output over the same two-week period was also up sharply at 222.4 million liters compared with 25.9 million liters a year ago. Cane crushing totaled 5.26 million tonnes in early March, up from 292,600 tonnes in the same half month a year ago, Unica said. Mills are strongly favoring the production of the biofuel over sugar, as is typical early in the harvest season when rains dilute sugars in cane and make production of the sweetener more difficult. In early March, mills devoted 70.5 percent of their cane to ethanol and 29.5 percent to sugar.
Rains are expected to give mills fair chance in the coming months as cooling Pacific waters shift global weather patterns into La Nina, which should mean a typical dry season for Brazil's cane belt. Mills have to suspend harvest during rain. Since the start of the current season on April 1, 2015, mills in the region have crushed a record 603.6 million tonnes of cane, up 6.4 percent from the year before. Sugar output has reached a cumulative 30.76 million tonnes in the final stretch of the season, down 3.4 percent from the year before, Unica said. Ethanol output for the year is at 27.6 billion liters, up 6.4 percent on the year.