Labasa Mill closed since Monday (28 June)

[posted 30 June 2010, 1400]

Crushing at the Labasa mill came to a standstill at 7am last Monday. The mill has been plagued with breakdowns ever since it began crushing on 22 June.

Despite the chronic stoppages as reported in our web story of 23 June, FSC continued to issue harvesting quotas, thus inconveniencing and putting the farmers to unnecessary expense by way to having to house and feed their cane cutters.

The mill resumed crushing at 3.45pm on 23 June (after two breakdowns) and continued to crush at a very slow rate. It stopped at 11am on 24 June and resumed at 2pm, coming to a halt at 3.30pm. Resumed at 7pm and crushed at slow rate until 12.45pm on 25 June when it broke down yet again.

Crushing resumed at 10am the next day, 26 June. A major derailment occurred on the afternoon of Saturday 26 June, cutting off the supply of rail trucks to Bucaisau, Daku and Wainikoro sectors as well as the haulage of laden rail trucks form these sectors to the mill.

The mill broke down again on the night of 28 June and had not restarted when this story was posted at 3pm on 30 June.

So, all in all, the Labasa mill has chalked up a breakdown time of 7 out of 9 days. What a record!

As FSC does not release crush and sugar make figures, it is not known how many tonnes of cane were crushed during the stop-start operation and whether any sugar was made.

If this trend continues, cane-farmers can look to another year of colossal financial losses.