Glacier FarmMedia – When shelves across Western Canada were empty of sugar after strike action at the Rogers Sugar refinery in Vancouver, Canada’s sugar beet growers renewed calls for a national sugar strategy.
Groups including the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers have long decried Canada’s reliance on imported cane sugar rather than Canadian-grown sugar beets. Alberta’s crop makes up about eight per cent of the sugar consumed in the country, the group says, and a national sugar policy could increase sugar beet market share to 16 per cent.
“A sugar policy would protect the sugar beet market and the ability for us to expand the industry,” executive director Jennifer Crowson said during the shortage, adding that such a policy would make the sugar supply chain more resilient.
Read Also
Farming Smarter receives financial boost from Alberta government for potato research
Farming Smarter near Lethbridge got a boost to its research equipment, thanks to the Alberta government’s increase in funding for research associations.
More emphasis on sugar beets would give the value chain more options for homegrown sourcing, the group has argued, making it less vulnerable to disruption.
Today, the strike is over and the sugar shortage is resolved. Now Canada’s largest sugar processing plant is in the works, built by Sucro Can and set to open in 2025 in Hamilton, Ont.
However, the project won’t bolster beet growers’ quest for greater market share. The new facility will refine sugar cane imported from Central and South America and has no plans for Canadian sugar beets.
Sucro Can chair Don Hill said the facility will play a vital role in the broader Canadian food system.
“The food industry’s very interconnected,” said Hill. “There may not be a huge connection (between) what we do and what Ontario growers do, but it all comes down to, you know, trying to create the strongest, most vibrant integrated food manufacturing possible.”
The company chose Hamilton because southern Ontario is “the epicentre of Canadian food manufacturing, and so all of our major customers are within a relatively short driving distance to their plants.
“It also gives us the advantage of, if we want to export sugar to the U.S., we’re obviously right at the doorstep,” said Hill.
The U.S. is the major destination for Ontario-grown sugar beets. Alberta production is processed at the Rogers Sugar facility in Taber, Alta. That plant is the company’s only beet processing facility. It contracts with about 400 growers every year and produces about 150,000 tonnes of sugar.
In Manitoba, interest in the sugar market is a vestige of the province’s own sugar beet sector. The crop disappeared from fields in the late 1990s after closure of a Rogers plant in Winnipeg in 1997.
The Alberta Sugar Beet Growers say a national strategy would allow industry expansion that could include production in Manitoba.
“Other industry people and corporations say that, in the event that there was a policy, they would come and build another processing plant,” Crowson said.
The sector has contacted Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and a working group hopes to help outline a national policy, she added.
Competition
In a Jan. 16 press release, Sucro Founder and CEO Jonathan Taylor attributed the new refinery to continued success of the sugar sector.
“The sugar markets in both Canada and the United States are experiencing steady, long term, sustainable growth, and Sucro is investing to supply these growing market demands,” he said.
Hill said competition in the sugar sector has “come up short” on supply in recent years.
“For a lot of food products, you have to have sugar supply. If you don’t have confidence that you’re going to have enough supply going forward, it’s going to make your own expansion plans very, very difficult.”
