December 16, 2025 RAJIV RAO
The transplanted facility will help make the Caribbean region selfsufficient in sugar
Sugar processing company Sucro, which has been operating out of the Hamilton Harbour lands since 2019, will reuse its redundant equipment to open up a whole new market for its product.
The company says it will dismantle and ship its older sugar plant in Hamilton to Guyana, where it will become the largest refinery in the Caribbean, serving local markets.
Meanwhile, the new plant, built for $135 million over the past two years and boasting the largest potential capacity in Canada at one million tonnes, will take over from the smaller one.
“We only built it in 2019,” said Don Hill, chair of Sucro, referring to the older plant, “but we’ve already outgrown it because of the huge increase in demand in the Canadian marketplace.
“For a smaller market like the Caribbean region, this size and scale of refinery is a perfect fit.”
Sugar has had a long and troubled history over four centuries in Guyana, during which the Dutch and the British used enslaved Africans to produce enough sugar to make it the backbone of the colonial economy.
When slavery was abolished, indentured labourers were shipped in by the British from India as replacements.
Following the country’s independence in 1966, sugar continued to play an important role in the economy, but slumped considerably over the last few decades due to lack of investment and decaying production facilities.
“The entire Caribbean region has had to import all of their refined sugar,” Hill said.
Sucro is also building a refinery in Belize and, together with the one in Guyana, the two refineries will, according to Hill, meet all or most of the Caribbean’s refined sugar requirements.
“It will create investment, jobs, food security, all of those good things within that community.”
Source: Hamilton Spectator via PressReader
Guyana, Belize to satisfy CARICOM’s refined sugar demand – Demerara Waves Online News- Guyana