By KYIV. Jan 11 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Agro-industrial holding Astarta, the largest sugar producer in Ukraine, has completed the 2022 sugar-making season, which lasted from September to January. In total, about 2 million tonnes of sugar beets were processed into 282,000 tonnes of sugar.
As reported on the company’s website on Wednesday, the past sugar-making season was the most difficult in the history of the holding, although the volume of sugar produced grew by 6% by the 2021 season and by 25% by the 2020 season.
The yield of sugar from beets in the Astarta past season was 14.26%, with an average for Ukraine of 13.98%, and 99% of the sugar produced correspond to highest quality.
The holding referred to the preliminary data of the Ukrtsukor association, according to which the share of Astarta in the Ukrainian sugar production market in the 2022 season was 25%.
The sugar producer said that its sugar beet acreage in the central and western regions of Ukraine was not significantly affected by the hostilities, but it faced a number of other challenges.
"Due to increased costs of fertilizers, crop protection agents and fuel, the cost of growing sugar beet per hectare grew. Almost continuous rains during the harvest period made it much more difficult both to harvest the crop and to transport it from the fields to processing plants. However, in 2022 Astarta harvested 1.8 million tonnes of sugar beets with a yield of 56 tonnes per ha," the holding company quoted its Director for Processing Agricultural Products Yevhen Sadovy.
Astarta said that during the war it was able to introduce a number of energy saving projects at its sugar refineries, in particular, a scheme for autonomous energy supply of enterprises in the event of an energy blackout.
Astarta is a vertically integrated agro-industrial holding operating in eight regions of Ukraine. It includes six sugar refineries, agricultural enterprises with a land bank of 220,000 hectares and dairy farms with 22,000 heads of cattle, an oil extraction plant in Hlobyne (Poltava region), seven granaries and a biogas complex.
