In Brief… – for Feb. 5, 2009

Smaller Alta. beet crop costs Rogers: Shrinking sugar beet acreage helped bite deep into Rogers Sugar’s bottom line for the company’s first quarter. The Montreal income trust posted profit of $73,000 on $138.4 million in revenues for Q1 ending Dec. 31, down from $18.5 million on $173 million in the year-earlier period. Its gross margin

Mechanical sugar harvest increases unemployment in Brazil

Ines Ferreira dos Santos lives with four of her kids in a spacious, colourful house at the end of a dusty street. “With money from sugar cane we built this house. It has been good to us, too good,” the 43-year-old housewife said. This is the 11th year that her husband, Joao Barbosa dos Santos,