The Federacion Dominicana de Colonos Azucareros (Fedoca), which groups sugar cane growers, said that the State Sugar Council (CEA) has not been able to pay off its debt with them, because it has been administered to favor political people who traditionally collect monthly checks from that institution. It condemned the practice in the CEA where some RD$20 million is spent on what it called “bottles” – some 10,000 people which, it claims, are paid RD$2,000 per month without having to work. Fedoca also said that there are many more “bottles” that collect “luxury” salaries. The interview by Adriano Fajardo of the newspaper Hoy was carried out before the replacement of the administrator of the CEA, agronomist Dhimas de Moya by engineer Juan Andrés Plá.
Mr Plá has gone on record saying that the CEA is perfectly recoverable. He has been employed by the CEA in middle management positions in the past. The CEA is undergoing one of its most profound crises, with debts of over one thousand million pesos, of which over RD$300 million is owed to the sugar cane growers, who are now refusing to deliver more sugar cane to the government’s sugar consortium.
Sugar production this year is fixed at 275,000 tonnes, of which the government has already sold 130,000 tonnes. The sugar cane growers said that they are only working 33 percent as a consequence.