Sweet talk: How Mungal Singh plans to revive the
By By Sue-Ann Wayow
sugar industryStory Created: May 18, 2011 at 1:04 AM ECT
(Story Updated: May 18, 2011 at 1:04 AM ECT )
ALMOST eight years after State-owned sugar producing company Caroni (1975) Ltd was closed permanently, the sugar industry is being revived.
For the past two years, entrepreneur Mungal Singh has been building a mini-sugar mill near his home at Rochard Douglas Road, Barrackpore.
By next month he plans to produce his first supply of sugar for sale.
Singh has invested $8 million to buy the production equipment from India.
The 42-year-old said he always wanted to produce sugar.
He said he was introduced to the estate just after leaving secondary school.
"I am from a cane farming background I grew up in the sugar cane industry in Barrackpore and I always had this special likeness. There is something that is in your blood and it is something that could make money."
After the closure of Caroni, Singh said he did research on the internet.
"After doing some research I realised the economies (of scale) in it were good according to my formula and arithmetic. I am seeing that there is money in it, that it is feasible and it is sustainable and it has a more than one facet to it," he tells the Business Express.
"It allows the lands that I have to be utilised and then when I looked at sugar on the whole on the world market, there is a big demand and the supply keeps going down so as all businesses, there is a good equitable market for it. I decided all these little things put together gave me a picture of a profitable and sustainable form of income."
The mill is named Mookram Sugar Mills Ltd, after Singh's deceased father who began working on the estate at age 12.
It is co-owned by Singh and his two brothers.
Singh said he had the support of local cane farmers who were still willing to be a part of the sugar industry.
"All these farmers put together who had the sugar cane already, they came to me and were offering their crops and I gladly accepted it. I will be buying per tonne. We average at the moment around $200 to $220 per tonne we can be paying farmers."
The factory will be able to produce 100 tonnes every 12 hours and therefore will only be able to accept a limited amount of cane from farmers, Singh said.
He says he can't say how much sugar will be produced from the cane because he does not yet know the sucrose level.
He admitted there were problems in setting up the equipment of the factory.
Singh said: "The majority of the equipment came from India and our local boys assembled it using the schematics from India. When we had completed our assembly, we got visited by the Indians. They sent a technician to just run through the mill so that we set it in the correct format and they sent a next guy for a month to actually show us how sugar is made using their process, this plant."
He said the steam boiler that was purchased locally had to be adjusted to accommodate 100 tonnes instead of the original 50 tonnes per 12 hours.
Fifteen people will be employed on each 12-hour shift.
The first set of sugar was produced approximately seven weeks ago and Singh said the quality was very good.
He said the wholesale price for sugar is estimated at about $2.50 per pound.
"We are trying to target the local market. We can export but we can try to satisfy the local market. Our capacity from our research, we know we cannot supply it because the local market demands over 70,000 tonnes per year. We will not be producing that. We cannot have that capacity but whatever way we can input into the local economy and the local community we are willing to go that way."
He says the company will not be selling the sugar retail.
"We do not have that in any planning stage at the moment we are more or less going to sell to a dealership that will either do the packaging or there are smaller agents who have the entire infrastructure to handle raw sugar into packaging."
