Malaysia Aims To Export 2.7 Million Sugar Cane Stems Monthly To Dubai

TANJONG KARANG (Malaysia), April 27 (Bernama) -- Malaysia targets to export 2.7 million of sugar cane stems monthly to Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2013 to meet the demand by the emirate, which has shown interest in importing the product since last year. Minister of Agriculture and Agro-based Industry Noh Omar said Dubai has started to show interest in local sugar cane following his ministry's visit to the UAE, which also included the promotion of sugar cane juice. He said the market price for export of sugar cane to Dubai was RM2 per stem for Grade A, which are produced by three main states namely Johor, Negri Sembilan and Selangor. "We are using technology invented by the Malaysian Agricultural Research and Development Institute (Mardi) which is also responsible for the packaging to export the sugar cane to Dubai," he said in a news conference after officiating a course on sugar cane industry and 'meet the farmers' session, here Friday. Noh said at present, the country exported only 38,000 sugar cane stems per month to Dubai. He said the product was also exported to Singapore and there were also demand from other countries including Hong Kong and Brunei. "There is an encouraging response for sugar cane farming whereby areas planted with the crop has increrased from 19.42 hectares to 121.4 hectares in Tanjong Karang alone over the last one year. "The number of participants has also increased from 43 to 100 over the same period," said Noh. He said his ministry was confident with the growth of the industry among farmers as well as asisstance programmes carried out by Mardi and the Federal Agricultural Marketing Authority (Fama), Malaysia was able to export sugar cane to meet the demand of importing countries. He said the ministry was also encouraging farmers to undertake sugar cane farming as it is easy to manage and does not require big land area to develop the plantation. --BERNAMA