Peter Espeut
I AM in St. Kitts this week, a beautiful and fertile island, full of history and natural resources, with a population of 36,000 souls. An article in the current issue of their tourism magazine St. Kitts & Nevis Visitor states that "By the early 1700s ... thanks to fertile volcanic soil and the abundant rainfall, St. Kitts soon surpassed Nevis, Barbados and Jamaica to become the hub of the British sugar trade in the West Indies, a position it has held up until today." Maybe a little overstated, with only 7,900 acres of sugar on the ground, but sugar has been big here.
Last year they harvested 150,000 tons of cane and produced 10,000 tons of sugar, employing 1,400 Kittitians - a hefty proportion of their labour force - as well as a substantial number of sugar workers from Guyana and the Dominican Republic every year.
GOOD STANDARD OF LIVING
Does this surprise you? You need to know that St. Kitts has the second highest standard of living in the Caribbean (after Barbados). Yes, little St. Kitts had to import contract labour to harvest their sugar crop, not because they lack population, but because their population is educated, and can get better paying jobs than cane-cutting. Jamaica is not in that position; we have continued the education system which began just after emancipation intended to protect and maintain an uneducated field labour force for the benefit of the plantocracy.
The words of the Rev. John Sterling around 1834 during the debate on Jamaica's first Education Act in the Jamaican House of Assembly have never left me: "Emancipation has removed the whip; we must now control their minds through education." Successive governments - colonial and neo-colonial - have made sure that we have large numbers of people who can do nothing better than cane-cutting (or banana-weeding, or coffee-picking, etc.).
In December 2004 the government of St. Kitts & Nevis finally threw in the towel, deciding that with the impending end of sugar preferences from the European Union, the current sugar crop would be their last. After growing sugar since 1648 (the English hadn't even captured Jamaica yet) - after more than 350 years - St. Kitts went out of sugar production on July 30, 2005.
But looking at the fields of waving sugar cane here, you wouldn't know it. The crop looks healthy - as robust as the fields at Monymusk I pass on the way to my office in Lionel Town.
NON-BUSINESS DECISIONS
Last Friday I saw a few neat, empty cane rows, and thought harvesting had begun, but it was only the monkeys, I was told - the biggest agricultural pest in St. Kitts - breaking and eating what they wanted. The sugar crop of St. Kitts is now in the hands of monkeys. The era of sugar is over in St. Kitts!
"Even with the preferential arrangements we were losing money," Conrad Kelly, former agricultural Manager of the St. Kitts Sugar Manufacturing Corporation told me. He was quite clear that it was "too much government involvement" and "too many non-business decisions" that made them high-cost producers, and which had brought them to this.
Can't you resonate with this? When we could have mechanised to increase efficiency and lower costs, we didn't (to protect jobs and votes). When we could have upgraded our education system to diversify our rural labour force out of unskilled manual labour, our neo-colonial politicians didn't (pandering to powerful planter interests). You reap what you sow!
St. Kitts has now stopped importing unskilled labour; their labour force is educated and can do something else to grow their economy. I had a nice chat with their Director of Agriculture, Dr. Jerome Thomas. They have plans for their former sugar lands: some will go into vegetable production, some into golf courses; some will go into housing, and some will go into other business enterprises. They have taken a tough decision and are moving on with life after sugar.
Our neo-colonials seem to want to hold on to the trappings of our colonial heritage 'real bad'. The sugar crop of St. Kitts is now in the hands of monkeys. Well, 'nuff said on that subject.
Peter Espeut is a rural development sociologist and is executive director of an environment and development NGO.
