PUBLISHED: 6 September 2023 at 4:00 p.m.
After a review found that the dust produced by the training negatively impacts the health of about two-thirds of the country’s population, the Industry Ministry will intensify measures to prevent farmers from setting fire to their sugarcane fields to help harvesting.
To get rid of the plant’s leaves and make the grain easier to practice, some sugar farmers burn their fields straight before harvesting. The practice results in large amounts of extremely good PM2.5 dust, which pollutes the environment, as well as” black winter,” which is made up of embers that fall on areas near the fields.
To deter sugar producers from burning their areas to remove the leaves before selling them to sugar mills, the state has been paying them 120 ringgit per tonne since 2021. It had invested about 14.4 billion baht in the system as of September 2022, but burning is still going on, according to industry permanent director Nattapol Rangsitpol.
Out of the 66.66 million tonnes of sugarcane that were sent to mills across the nation during the 2020 – 2021 crop season, about 17.61 million tons — roughly 26 %— were burned.
The percentage increased to 27 % in the 2021 – 2022 season, with 25.12 million tonnes of sugarcane sent to mills that were burned. Out of the 93.89 million tonnes of sugarcane sent to the country’s mills in the 2022 – 2023 season, about 30.78 million tons — or about 33 %— were processed by burning. According to Mr. Nattapol, on 3.08 million ray were impacted.
PM2.5″ moves in the direction of the storm and remains there for a very long time.” Greater Bangkok, the Central Plains, and the East and Northeast areas, where around 44 million people reside, are frequently covered in dust for about six weeks each year, according to him.
According to him, authorities will increase the enforcement of relevant laws and add fresh incentives for farmers to refrain from setting their fields on fire.