The sugar lobby group Canegrowers says a joint announcement by Australia and Indonesia to reduce imports tariffs will push competitiveness to improve. The Australian sugar will drop to up to about 5 percent down from its current level of 12.5 percent.
In 2015 the Indonesian Government decided to give sugar exporters from Thailand a tariff of 5 percent, this is while the Australia remained at about 12 percent, which effectively makes the Thai sugar cheaper to import by $30 per ton.
In the past 2 years the higher tariff had seen exports into Indonesia fall from 1 million tons per annum to a slash down of 200,000 tons this was a a report from Paul Schembri, the chairman of Canegrowers. He also said in that the mark down was a $400 million dollar pain in the neck.
There is a lot of work to be done because of the need to grow the current export volumes to Indonesia back to 1 million tons, but Mr. Schembri remained positive. As well as being a benefit to Australian cane growers, Mr. Schembri said that such an increase in export volumes and revenue would have a better flow-on effect for the wider community.
The Sugar industry is very important in most communities, and is even considered as one of the economic and social backbone of community like the Mackay. The Canegrowers chairman also said in a statement "We need to export our production to as many markets as possible [and] Indonesia is a valuable market to the Australian sugar industry."
The industry is in faith that the new tariff could be implemented later this year.