A shortage of labor and rising costs have led to an increase in standover cane during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. In 2022, there were 26,040 tonnes of standover cane, with 82 percent resulting from labor shortages or costs that farmers were unable to manage. According to Bhan Pratap Singh, the CEO of FSC, the total standover cane in the 2023 season rose to 28,575 tonnes, marking a 10 percent increase from the previous year.
Mr. Singh noted that 93 percent of the unharvested cane was due to labor-related challenges. He explained that 87 percent of this standover cane came from uneven and hilly terrains where mechanical harvesters could not be utilized, severely impacting manual harvesting efforts. Manual harvesting currently represents around 50 percent of total cane harvesting, yet the number of cutters has dwindled to approximately 5,000 to 6,000.
Farmers have struggled to find laborers, particularly for harvesting activities on their farms. To address this issue, FSC is collaborating with the Ministry of Sugar Industry to introduce harvesters suitable for use in hilly areas from 2023 through 2025. Mr. Singh mentioned that manual harvesting accounted for 42.2 percent of the total cane harvested this season, which is a 5 percent increase from 2022.
While only 8.9 percent of the cane was mechanically harvested in 2016, significant advances have been made in the intervening seven years in both the number of harvesters available and the amount of cane harvested. The number of harvesters has grown by 92, and the volume of cane harvested as a percentage of the total crop has reached 42.4 percent, highlighting the increasing demand for mechanization in sugar cane farming.
The 2023 crop reached 1.57 million tonnes from a harvested area of 32,285 hectares, supplied by 10,565 growers, with an average yield of 47 tonnes per hectare.