Addressing a meeting on the cultivation of spring sugar beet, Abbas Keshavarz said the careful planning and efforts during the past seven years have led to an increase in the domestic production of sugar and helped the country save around $1 billion in imports.
Highlighting the growing transparency in the competition among the local producers of sugar and the government intervention to regulate prices, the caretaker said the domestic farmers have shown more enthusiasm for the cultivation of sugar beet and have also generated more revenue in recent years.
Keshavarz also pointed to the Ministry of Agriculture’s efforts to help farmers get a real price for their products, saying the flooding in the country in the current Iranian year adversely affected the production of sugar beet and led to a rise in the sugar prices.
Sugar beet is a strategic plant that plays a leading role in the production of sugar, forage, and other agricultural produce, he added, and called for efforts to stimulate investment in farming, support the farmers, factories and associations, and to establish processing factories in the areas that are major producers of sugar beet in order to reduce the costs.
