Havana, Jun 27 (RHC)-- President Miguel Díaz-Canel called for a technological and organizational leap in Cuba's sugar agroindustry to diversify production and add value to it, Granma newspaper reported Monday."

According to the newspaper, the Cuban president said that this sector has the experience to undertake the transformations.

We cannot continue doing the same thing when times have changed, and life is telling us that we have to go to other concepts, he said this Sunday to participants in a workshop held among managers, industrial technicians, and sugarcane producers of the country.

The  2021-2022 harvest produced some  480 thousand tons of sugar; 36 sugar mills milled a little more than six million tons of cane, in the lowest production in over one hundred years.

Granma noted that agribusiness is starting a new management model in which exclusive sugar production is not the center of all calculations, strategies, efforts, and even the source of the primary income.

The seminar, which brought together more than a hundred specialists, was devoted to analyzing the main problems and challenges of the sector.

It was also attended by academics, scientists, and other experts linked to the sector, many of them women.

For Díaz-Canel, the sugar agribusiness has "a mass of committed workers and laborers, with a sense of belonging, who are confident that the sector can still recover, and this is in our hands, with everyone looking for that recovery."

According to Deputy Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia, the objective is to produce more alcohols, rums, electricity, and derivatives to sell in the domestic and foreign markets, and food

It is also a question of real autonomy for the companies, so that the directors, their boards of directors and their workers make their own decisions and do not have to consult "from above", Tapia insisted.

At the meeting, around twenty managers, specialists, experts, and scientists explained their work in their fields.

They discussed difficulties, limitations, and also the results while they pondered the sector's potentialities, which, said the Cuban president, "if we know how to take advantage of them, we will go to a different moment in sugarcane production and its derivatives," reported Granma.