Iran expected to produce 700,000 tons of sugar from sugarcane this year

Some 650,000 to 700,000 tons of sugar will be produced from sugarcane this year, an official with Iran’s Agriculture Ministry said.

According to Peyman Hesadi, the director of the Agriculture Ministry’s sugar plants project, the total area under sugarcane cultivation across Iran this year is 90,000 hectares, predicting that 6.5 to 7 million tons of sugarcane are estimated to be produced.

He added that so far, 45,000 hectares of sugarcane have been harvested from the fields.

Hesadi said that 5.5 million tons of sugarcane were harvested in the country and in the province of Khuzestan last year, and 546,000 tons of sugar were produced from this amount of sugarcane.

He said that the average yield of sugarcane production this year is about 80 tons per hectare and that the water and climatic conditions for sugarcane fields have been better.

The official stressed that the Ministry of Agriculture has no plans to expand sugarcane cultivation and that its approach is to increase production efficiency and reduce water consumption in sugarcane fields.

Hesadi said that they are looking to use underground irrigation in sugarcane fields to save water, and that at present, each of the 10 sugarcane companies has implemented a 100-hectare pilot project for underground irrigation in the province of Khuzestan.