Harry Bonanno, chairman of grower organisation CANEGROWERS, told Reuters that estimated losses had now grown to A$250 million from the estimate of more than A$175 million last month.

Harvesters were still getting bogged in the fields in the Burdekin and Proserpine area, using heavy equipment to make very little progress on a crop that was "pretty lousy anyway", he said.

No substantive change in production prospects had occurred over the past week despite reasonably fine weather, Bonanno said.

"The harvest is not going well, but it's going as well as can be expected," he said. "It's not good and the prospects for it improving are not bright at all."

Sugar content in the cane had dropped to 10 per cent or below in many mill areas, he said.

This left the average commercial cane sugar (CCS) content in the sugarstate of Queensland over the past week at 10.77 per cent, against 14.39 per cent in the same week of 1997.

With the harvest about three-quarters through, there were serious doubts that much more cane could be taken off if further rain fell, Bonanno said.

"If it keeps fine now we'll make some dent in it, but if we get more rain then we'll start to get a bit frustrated about the effort to get a very poor crop off," he said.

"It's not a very happy situation."

After being hit by unseasonal storms in early September and then by recurrent wild weather, the state's raw sugar output from the current crop has been downgraded by Queensland Sugar Corp by about 500,000 tonnes to about 4.7 million tonnes from earlier forecasts.

Before the onset of torrential rain associated with the ending of the El Nino weather effect, Australia as a whole was forecast to produce 5.54 million tonnes of raw sugar from the 1998 cane crop, with Queensland supplying 5.2 million tonnes. Australia's raw sugar production last year was5.57 million tonnes, with exports worth about A$1.7 billion.

Latest cane crush figures from CANEGROWERS show that three of four mills in the Burdekin region crushed no cane in the week ended November 7, with one mill, Invicta, crushing only 164 tonnes.

The mills resumed crushing on Tuesday this week, an official in charge of the Burdekin mills told Reuters.

Queensland's cane crush is now expected to last until mid-December, a very late end to the crushing season which is normally concluded by about the end of November.

A late crush is marked by low sugar content in the cane.