Bar­ba­dos has pro­duced 96 000 tonnes of sug­ar for the 2025 sug­ar cane har­vest in­clud­ing 6.8 mil­lion kilo­grammes of mo­lasses.

“This, of course, speaks to the fact that we have re­mained con­sis­tent in de­liv­er­ing sug­ar so that we can keep things sweet whilst we ex­port the rum we pro­duce,” said Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter, In­dar Weir, adding that this year’s crop yield­ed 3.8 mil­lion kilo­grammes of sug­ar.

The an­nounce­ment of this year’s sug­ar crop comes amid con­tin­ued un­cer­tain­ty about who con­trols the near four-cen­turies-old sug­ar in­dus­try, with Weir main­tain­ing that the gov­ern­ment is still in charge of the in­dus­try.

But the Bar­ba­dos Sus­tain­able En­er­gy Co-op­er­a­tive So­ci­ety Lim­it­ed (Co-op En­er­gy) in­sists that the state re­lin­quished over­sight as part of a planned tran­si­tion to a work­er-owned mod­el.

In March, Lieu­tenant Colonel Trevor Browne, head of Co-op En­er­gy, was quot­ed as say­ing that no for­mal han­dover from the Bar­ba­dos Agri­cul­tur­al Man­age­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (BAMC) had oc­curred.

“We’ve asked them and writ­ten to them. They haven’t even re­spond­ed yet. And I don’t have any army that can go in and take it over,” he said, de­scrib­ing the sit­u­a­tion as “in abeyance”.

In a gen­er­al mem­bers’ up­date is­sued on Jan­u­ary 8, Co-op En­er­gy stat­ed: “The ex­cel­lent progress that was ini­tial­ly made in the trans­fer of BAMC con­trol… stalled when the gov­ern­ment failed to pro­duce in­de­pen­dent­ly ver­i­fied val­u­a­tions of the as­sets and li­a­bil­i­ties to be trans­ferred.”

But Weir coun­tered that Co-op En­er­gy has not yet met its side of the bar­gain. He said that the group was re­quired to in­vest ap­prox­i­mate­ly BS$16 mil­lion (One BDS$=US$0.50 cents), be­gin­ning with an up­front pay­ment of four mil­lion dol­lars, none of which has ma­te­ri­alised.