Record Prices/Reduced Crop
Poor weather and mill performance hamper season
In the 2023 sugar season (May to December), Australia harvested 29.76 million tonnes of sugarcane from 341,084 hectares, spanning from far north Queensland to northern New South Wales. The average Commercial Cane Sugar (CCS) content was 13.68 units.
Queensland alone produced 28.65 million tonnes from 328,978 hectares, a decrease of over 2.6 million tonnes from 2022, due to poor growing conditions, harvest delays, milling inefficiencies, and labour shortages.
Around 85% of Australia’s raw sugar was exported to markets like South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, and the UK, with the remainder refined for domestic use. Despite global sugar market volatility, 2023-24 saw record sugar prices, exceeding $900 per tonne, allowing many growers to secure prices well above their production costs.
