Could sugar beet be on its way back?

There’s many’s a long road without a turn. And so it is that this week the focus came back to sugar beet.  Almost 13 years after the lost crop was harvested, it might well be that we may soon see the crop return and a viable sugar industry re-established.

A meeting last week in Bunclody brought together farmers and the promoters of a project close to Castlefermot to see if there was an interest in the county in growing beet to supply the new plant.  The ending of national sugar quotas in the EU means that if a farmer wishes to grow a crop, then it’s a matter for them. There’s no intervention, no quota and no safety net now for many in agriculture.  Food security, which the EU was originally planned to ensure, is a thing of the past.

If there was a moment when that became clear to me, it was about 3 weeks before I became Mayor in 2010. I was sitting in an office in Brussels with an official from the EU Transport Commission and we were discussing funding for railways. Our local railway in South Wexford had withered because of the collapse of the beet industry.  While we discussed the economics of sugar production, the official, a personable German turned to me and asked me; “Why should the EU support the production of a spice?” I responded by telling him that it was not up to me to continue to make an argument which the beet industry and FF government had stopped making years ago. Instead the EU had a responsibility to shift freight in an environmentally sustainable way.

And what I said then matters even more today.  The world price of sugar is now much lower than it was 13 years ago. Any farmer hoping to grow beet will need to grow large volumes of it to make it worthwhile.  The average size of an Irish farm may not make for too many farmers taking up the offer as would have done so under the greencore regime.

South Wexford has unique soil which lends itself to tillage.  If sugar is to return, South Wexford may well see a renewed interest in beet growing.  One other advantage that South Wexford has is a railway line that took the crop each Autumn to be processed in Mallow. 

The sites at Mallow and Carlow remain the property of Greencore who want to see them develop for housing.  The proposed site at Castledermot is a distance from the rail network. The consumer price for sugar never dropped despite the production cost reductions since 2005. Sugar is enormously profitable as a result. The cheapest own brand of sugar here sells for €1/20 per Kg. In Britain or the north you can bulk buy 5Kg sacks for a little more than £3. That’s some mark up.  We import almost €550M worth of sugar a year. So there’s a good margin to be made for any operator but sugar will have to be sustainably harvested and transported to reduce CO2 emissions. Agriculture and transport are 2 of the worst offenders in Ireland when it comes to greenhouse gases.

Many may recall the frustration of being caught behind tractors pulling trailers of beet, beet falling off the back of trailers and mud and dirt on the road. So that’s why there is a need for the Department of Transport to engage with the operators to ensure that beet from Wexford is taken by rail to Carlow. It’d be useful if planning required either the laying of a spur line to the plant  or at least the building of a processing rail depot in Carlow from where beet can be hauled to the factory.

It’s not sustainable to haul beet by the truck load long distances, especially given the low price that farmers will get.  So just maybe it is a case of down but not beaten when it comes to our railway in South Wexford.  There may be just another twist in store for that line.