Cuba is urging sugar workers to take advantage of recent rainfall and ease damage caused by drought, local media said on Monday, though reports left no doubt that the coming harvest was in trouble and some mills would not open.
Light-to-moderate rainfall over the last few weeks has put some life back into cane plantations devastated by months of unusually dry weather, but the moisture was not nearly enough.
"Last year we had 680 millimetre's (26.8 inches) of rain through July and this year 190 millimetre's (7.5 inches)," the deputy director of central Villa Clara province's sugar industry, Sergio Guillen Sosa, said.
Guillen Sosa, speaking on state-run radio last week, said cane had been seriously hurt by the drought. He said at least two of the province's 13 mills would not open during the December to May harvest, despite efforts to increase cultivation and use more fertiliser.
Villa Clara produced 264,000 tonnes of sugar during the recently concluded harvest, which weighed in at 2.52 million tones of raw sugar.
The world's fourth-largest sugar exporting country sells abroad all but 700,000 tonnes of its crop.
"Carlos Lage Davila, member of the political bureau and secretary of the Executive Committee of the Council of Ministers, urged sugar workers to look for alternatives and increase efforts to lessen the drought's effects on plantations," eastern Santiago de Cuba's Communist party weekly, Sierra Maestra, reported.
"Santiago will assign cane from less efficient mills to the more efficient ones a measure that could ease the negative effects of less cane due to the drought," the weekly added.
The local paper in neighbouring Las Tunas province reported cane available at the country's biggest sugar mill, the Antonio Guiteras, was nearly half of last year's level when the mill produced 128,000 tonnes of sugar.
"We estimate drought and fires have reduced plantations between 30 percent and 45 percent," Aniceto Bermudez, plantation director at the mill, was quoted as saying.
Plantations in central Camaguey province and eastern Holguin and Las Tunas provinces, which produced 300,000 tonnes, 200,000 tonnes and 300,000 tonnes respectively, were believed to be in worse shape than in Villa Clara.
From April 2003 through May 2004 rainfall in parts of central and eastern Cuba was 400 millimetre's (16 inches) short of the norm, the government said.
June rainfall across the Caribbean island was 56 percent of the historic average, and much less in the three provinces.
Local experts were unanimous in forecasting production would drop a minimum 200,000 tonnes in 2004/2005, with some predicting a larger shortfall.
"It could well be worse than two years ago," one local economist who follows the industry closely, said, asking his name not be used.
The 2002/2003 sugar crop was the lowest in 70 years at 2.2 million tonnes after the Communist-run country shuttered 71 of 156 state mills and relegated 60 percent of sugar lands to other uses.