Queensland Sugar Limited (QSL) has finalised its 2020-Season pricing results, with the industry-owned sugar marketer notching up a record weighted average Shared Pool result of +$31 per tonne.
The Shared Pool captures QSL’s operating costs, premiums, other revenue, and the Loyalty Bonus where applicable, and is applied to every tonne marketed through QSL.
QSL General Manager Marketing Mark Hampson, pictured right, said the 2020 Shared Pool return for tonnage priced on the global ICE 11 raw sugar market was a new high for the marketer, which has been marketing sugar on behalf of Queensland cane growers and sugar millers for nearly a century.
Mr Hampson said the strong result reflected the high physical sales premiums available for Australian raw sugar last year, following a significant drop in production out of Thailand, one of our nation’s largest sugar competitors.
“The failure of the Thai crop due to drought in early 2020 and its subsequent slow recovery saw very strong demand for sugar last year in Asia, our primary market,” Mr Hampson said.
“As we’re a not-for-profit, pass-through organization, those higher net marketing returns were passed back to growers through the Shared Pool. That, and a long-awaited improvement in the ICE 11 sugar price saw QSL pools and grower-pricing results increase year-on-year.”
The February 2020 Guaranteed Floor Pool emerged as QSL’s best-performing ICE 11 pool for the season, returning $493/t IPS net, while the US Quota Pool, priced on the ICE 16 and automatically allocated to all QSL growers, returned $702/t IPS net (click here for QSL’s full 2020 pool results).
The highest grower-managed pricing achieved for the 2020 Season was $497/t gross actual in the Target Price Contract, with $456/t gross actual the weighted average price achieved for the season in this popular pricing option.
Mr Hampson said that while physical sales premiums had tempered for the 2021 Season, strong ICE 11 prices were still translating into attractive returns for Queensland sugar producers.
“QSL has seen record levels of grower-managed pricing in the past six months as our growers sought to lock in 2021-Season prices above the key $500/t level,” he said.
“The 2021-Season Target Price Contract passing $550/t this week, while QSL-managed pools are also off to strong start, with the 2021 Harvest Pool currently returning a weighted average of $516/t IPS net and the Actively Managed Pool not far behind it on $513/t IPS net.” (Click here for current market levels)
While Thailand is continuing to rebuild its crop, all eyes are now on the world’s largest sugar producer, Brazil, which has had a dry start to their season, prompting crop revisions and hopes of a continuing deficit market and associated strong sugar prices.
“With a decent Queensland crop in the paddock and attractive sugar prices, it’s shaping up to be a good season after a couple of tough years,” Mr Hampson said.
For more information contact Cathy Kelly on 0409 285 074
Sunshine Sugar congratulates Nutrition Innovation on being officially recognised as one of the best SMEs in the world by the United Nations, as part of the Food Systems Summit 2021.
The summit was created to raise awareness of the critical role that agriculture and food systems play in achieving a sustainable future.
“We teamed up with Nutrition Innovation in 2018, with the partnership delivering a world-first Low GI sugar – Sunshine Sugar Low GI; said Sunshine Sugar CEO, Mr Chris Connors. “This partnership delivered one of the first of our diversification projects that are a key part of the strategic business plan underpinning the future sustainability of the NSW sugar industry.”
This low GI sugar is made using the nucane® process, developed by Nutrition Innovation and made at the Condong sugar mill. The process produces a wholesome sugar that retains naturally occurring and beneficial antioxidants.
Being low in GI (Glycaemic Index) means that it is more slowly digested, absorbed and metabolised – resulting in lower and slower rise in blood glucose.
Selected from nearly 2,000 applications from 135 countries, Nutrition Innovation is amongst a group of winners who showcase inspiring, diverse, and impactful solutions in improving access to healthy, sustainable food.
“It’s a testimony to not only our innovations, but all of our partners around the world” said Founder and Chairman of Nutrition Innovation, Dr David Kannar. “Our objectives have always been to create innovations, like nucane™, to solve global health and nutrition challenges.
The United Nations Food Systems Summit hopes to bring together the science, finance and political commitment to transform global food systems. The goal is to introduce systems that are productive, environmentally sustainable, include the poor and promote healthy diets.
Wilmar Sugar is set to commemorate 100 years of operation at its Invicta Mill, with a full day of celebrations scheduled in August.
The Invicta Mill, near the town of Giru, will be marking this milestone on August 19 with a barbeque breakfast for employees, followed by a community night at Giru’s Brolga Park featuring a licensed bar, live entertainment, pop up food trucks and amusements for the kids.
Production superintendent at the Invicta Mill, James Wallace said an official ceremony would also be held at the entrance to the mill site from 10am, with a morning tea provided at which time the retired 12-tonne Invicta locomotive would be dedicated and left on permanent display outside the mill.
Mr Wallace said the mill had a special relationship with the town of Giru and it was hoped all of the community would come out to help celebrate the Centenary.
“The relationship between the mill and the town is symbiotic,” he said.
“The mill is vital to the ongoing life of the town, and the town supplies the mill with goods, services and, most importantly, people.
“About a third of our workforce lives in the broader Giru area. Many of those employees have had multiple generations of their family work at the mill.”
Wilmar programs system specialist and Giru local Paula Scarabel shares a longstanding history with the mill, one that dates back to its establishment in the area.
“My paternal great great grandfather was one of the original cane growers who supplied the mill. My maternal grandfather owned a truck and delivered wood to the mill for the boilers from 1944,” she said.
Ms Scarabel has dedicated her time to researching the mills history for a historical exhibition, having spent the last few months immersed in old photos, records and memorabilia. The exhibition will be on display at the Giru QCWA Hall during the Centenary celebrations.
“It’s been wonderful to go through all of the old records, some of which date back to before the mill was established,” she said.
Paula Scarabel with Invicta Mill historical records
Prior to finding its permanent home at Giru in 1921, the mill was operated in two different locations.
It originally resided on the Richmond River in New South Wales where it commenced crushing operations in the 1880s, before being dismantled and moved again to South Kolan near Bundaberg in 1906. https://0d221e9a94df6fa15dbc71e73cb1c0da.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Ms Scarabel said the entire logistical exercise was overseen by F.E. Barbat and Sons, from Ipswich.
“We actually have the original, handwritten letter from F.E. Barbat and Sons confirming the details of the purchase and relocation of the mill,” Mrs Scarabel said.
The letter will be on display among many other photos and memorabilia in the historical exhibition over the course of the celebration.
Sugarcane is one of the most productive plants on Earth, providing 80 percent of the sugar and 30 percent of the bioethanol produced worldwide. Its size and efficient use of water and light give it tremendous potential for the production of renewable value-added bioproducts and biofuels.
But the highly complex sugarcane genome poses challenges for conventional breeding, requiring more than a decade of trials for the development of an improved cultivar.
Two recently published innovations by University of Florida researchers at the Department of Energy’s Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) demonstrated the first successful precision breeding of sugarcane by using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing — a far more targeted and efficient way to develop new varieties.
CRISPR/Cas9 allows scientists to introduce precision changes in almost any gene and, depending on the selected approach, to turn the gene off or replace it with a superior version. The latter is technically more challenging and has rarely been reported for crops so far.
In the first report, researchers demonstrated the ability to turn off variable numbers of copies of the magnesium chelatase gene, a key enzyme for chlorophyll biosynthesis in sugarcane, producing rapidly identifiable plants with light green to yellow leaves. Light green plants did not show growth reduction and may require less nitrogen fertilizer to produce the same amount of biomass. That study, published in Frontiers in Genome Editing, was led by CABBI researchers Fredy Altpeter, Professor of Agronomy at the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), and Ayman Eid, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Altpeter’s lab.
The second study, also published in Frontiers in Genome Editing, achieved efficient and reproducible gene targeting in sugarcane, demonstrating the precise substitution of multiple copies of the target gene with a superior version, conferring herbicide resistance. Scientists co-introduced a repair template together with the gene-editing tool to direct the plant’s own DNA repair process so that one or two of the thousands of building blocks of the gene, called nucleotides, were precisely replaced in the targeted location. The result was that the gene product was still fully functional and could no longer be inhibited by the herbicide. That study was led by Altpeter and former CABBI Postdoc Mehmet Tufan Oz.
Altpeter’s lab, part of CABBI’s groundbreaking project to develop new oil-rich sugarcane varieties, has pioneered research with sugarcane genome editing using the TALEN gene-editing system. But the two recent publications are the first to successfully demonstrate CRISPR gene-editing in sugarcane as well as gene targeting for precision nucleotide substitution in sugarcane using any genome-editing tool.
“Now we have very effective tools to modify sugarcane into a crop with higher productivity or improved sustainability,” Altpeter said. “It’s important since sugarcane is the ideal crop to fuel the emerging bioeconomy.”
Sugarcane is a hybrid of two kinds of parent plants, so it has multiple sets of chromosomes rather than just two, as with humans or “diploid” plants. That creates genetic redundancy — with many sets of genes doing the same job — which may contribute to the plant’s productivity: If one set breaks, there’s a backup. But it makes sugarcane extremely difficult to modify. Crop scientists have to target all the genes and copies that govern a particular trait in order to make improvements.
With conventional breeding, two types of sugarcane are cross-bred to reshuffle the genetic information present in each parent in the hope of enhancing a desirable trait such as disease resistance. The problem is that genes are transferred from the parents to offspring in blocks, and desirable traits are often linked with deleterious genetic material. This means scientists often have to do multiple rounds of backcrossing and screen thousands of plants to restore the elite background, or underlying plant characteristics, in addition to improving one trait they’re attempting to modify. The process is more time-consuming and costly in plants with complex genomes like sugarcane.
Precise gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 offer a much more targeted path to crop improvement because it avoids the reshuffling of genetic information and simply changes inferior gene versions into superior ones. Given the sugarcane genome’s complexity, Altpeter and his team focused initially on genes that control noticeable traits — leaf color and herbicide resistance — so they could determine if the edits worked.
Beyond providing an easily identifiable phenotype, the targeted genes may prove useful in future research. Changing the chlorophyll content of sugarcane has the potential to increase canopy level photosynthesis or reduce the requirement for nitrogen fertilizer, based on previous plant modeling. Sugarcane is a tall, dense plant, with the top leaves getting lots of sun and shading lower foliage. If the upper leaves have less chlorophyll, sunlight can penetrate deeper into the plant, increasing its biomass with the same amount of light and less fertilizer. Herbicide resistance is not only an agronomically desirable trait to facilitate weed management; it will also facilitate future gene-editing efforts by enabling suppression of non-edited plant cells.
At CABBI, Altpeter and his team are already applying the results to develop improved sugarcane lines. Sugarcane has many different gene targets that can translate into more biomass or the production of lipids or specialty fatty acids — all of which would advance CABBI’s goals to produce fuels and other products from plants to replace petroleum. Because the crop is already harvested and processed for sugar extraction, the basic infrastructure to process its raw material into a product on a shelf is essentially in place.
“Adding value streams is relatively inexpensive compared to other crop alternatives,” Altpeter said.
Reference: Oz MT, Altpeter A, Karan R, Merotto A, Altpeter F. CRISPR/Cas9-mediated multi-allelic gene targeting in sugarcane confers herbicide tolerance. Front Genome Ed. 2021;3. doi: 10.3389/fgeed.2021.673566
Indian Government price and export subsidies have cost the Queensland sugar industry an estimated $1 billion.
The subsidies, which are currently under investigation by the World Trade Organisation, have contributed to substantially lower global sugar prices, according to a new report by Green Pool Commodity Specialists.
Peak industry organisations the Australian Sugar Milling Council (ASMC) and CANEGROWERS say the damaging impact confirms the need for continued pressure from the Australian Government and industry against India’s subsidies.
The ASMC commissioned report found Indian Government sugarcane price regulation was causing large production surpluses and India’s subsidised exports had contributed to substantially lower global sugar prices.
The report concludes that Queensland cane growers and sugar millers had incurred an estimated $1 billion revenue hit between 2017-18 and 2020-21 – or almost $5 million every week.
ASMC policy, economics and trade director David Rynne said Australia, Brazil and Guatemala made a formal complaint about the Indian Government’s subsidies to the WTO in February 2019.
A WTO report on the complaint may be handed down during 2021.
“Over the past four years, these subsidies have hurt Queensland growers, millers and sugar industry employees, their families and communities,” Mr Rynne said.
“The Green Pool report concluded that India’s current sugar production of more than 33 million tonnes exceeded its domestic sugar consumption of about 26mt.
“This excess subsidised production means export subsidies are likely to be an ongoing feature for many years if it is not reined in.”
ASMC and CANEGROWERS have praised the Australian Government for its advocacy on behalf of the sugar industry, urging continued support for growers, millers, dependent businesses and regional communities.
CANEGROWERS chairman Paul Schembri said the Australian Government had strongly backed the industry through the WTO case, but with concerning reports the Indian Government may be considering another package of export subsidies, it was clear that maintaining the collective effort of our diplomatic representatives to the Indian Government will be crucial.
“We are hopeful the WTO will find against the Indian subsidies because the economic pain for Australian growers, millers and sugar communities could be profound and prolonged if they continue,” Mr Schembri said.
“We will be sharing the findings of this report with the Australian and Queensland governments, and our local parliamentary representatives.
“We want to work with them to ensure progress on the path to a fairer global market for sugar.”
The Green Pool report found thatsince 2017-18 India’s sugar export subsidy program had become virtually institutionalised.
“India is now a structural exporter of sugar, with subsidies on exported sugar of up to one-third of an Indian mill’s cost of production of raw sugar,” the report reads.
“Besides export subsidies and regulated cane prices, India’s government also fixes domestic sugar prices well above global prices and provides soft loans to milling companies to build ethanol distilling operations to utilise sugar and processing by-products.
“The decision of India’s government to financially support significant levels of exports (initially compulsory) has had a real and perverse impact on the global market.”
ASMC is commissioning further analysis to determine the wider impact of India’s subsidies on Queensland’s regions and the state’s economy.
QSL has dispatched its first shipment of sugar from the current harvest.
The cargo of 42,000 tonnes of raw sugar from the Burdekin region was shipped on the Pacific Integrity out of Townsville earlier this month, bound for a refinery customer in South Korea.
QSL General Manager Marketing Mark Hampson said South Korea was one of Australia’s largest raw sugar markets, and had been one of QSL’s key customers for nearly 50 years.
“While we’ve had other shipments this year, those previous cargos delivered sugar produced last season,” Mr Hampson said.
“Queensland’s sugar is in high demand, so this first 2021-Season shipment marks the start of very a busy shipping program which will stretch through until mid-next year, with exports already planned for refining customers in South Korea, Indonesia, Japan and the USA.”
For further information contact Cathy Kelly on 0409 285 074.
