| China now grows about 1.5 million hectares of sugarcane and is the third largest sugar producer in the world after Brazil and India. Almost all Chinese sugarcane is still harvested by hand but labour in countryside areas has become more expensive and difficult to recruit. The sugar mills prefer to crush the cleaner cane that manual harvesting delivers and some mills, in areas where mechanical harvesting capacity has increased in recent years, have imposed restrictions on the quantity of machine cut cane that can be delivered each day. In the longer term, it is inevitable that the mills will accept a greater proportion of machine harvested cane. It is therefore important that an institutional structure and appropriate management strategies to control... |
