Experiments conducted by the governments of Sindh and Punjab shown encouraging interests to cultivate sugar beet instead of sugarcane. Presently, lot of discussion is taking place regarding the cultivation of sugar beet instead of sugarcane in Sindh in order to overcome shortage of irrigation water.
The Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Food and Livestock (Minfal) in association with the governments of Punjab and Sindh has conducted experiments on the cultivation of sugar beet.
Generated data shows encouraging results as sugar beet in a short duration of 4-5 months, required 5-6 irrigation, yielding 30 percent more sugar than sugarcane, which requires 22 irrigation to achieve crop maturity in 12-18 months. The sugar beet has a higher sugar recovery percentage than sugarcane in a case of United States, where sugar beet recovery rate is 16.04 percent.
The commercial transformation of the sugar beet mills require additional equipment for extraction and processing ie, sugar beet slicing, diffusion, liming and carbonation.
However, the bulk of the equipment of sugarcane factories can be utilised ie, weight bridges, boilers, steam generator plant, centrifugal, batch type sugar centrifugal, sugar dryers, packaging plants etc. Necessary infrastructure is already available, so commercial transformation of the sugar mills required minimum additional equipment. By encouraging the sugar beet production Pakistan would be able to extend the crushing season and produce more sugar in less water.
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