Adrian Frater, News Editor
( TOP L - R ) RICHARD JONES, DERICK HEAVEN, ANTHONY JOHNSON
( BOTTOM L - R ) ALLAN RICKARDS, ROGER TURNER AND KARL JAMES
WESTERN BUREAU:
As part of our special year-long focus on the agricultural sector, several stakeholders in the sugar industry were recently invited to an Editors' Forum to discuss the current state of the industry and share plans for the way forward. Below are comments from some of the participants.
TWENTY YEARS ago, sugar cane cultivation accounted for 25 per cent of the total lands under crop cultivation in Jamaica - about 45,000 hectares - and employed about 18 per cent of the total workforce involved in agriculture.
While sugar is still the largest industry in agriculture and remains one of the largest employers of labour in Jamaica, the sector has seen significant changes in recent times. Several factories have closed, the amount of lands under cane production has dropped drastically and the size of the workforce has dwindled.
"A lot of lands have been taken out of sugar over the past 20 years and a number of sugar factories have closed," said Tony Falloon, the agricultural service manager at the Sugar Industry Authority of Jamaica (SIA). "I know that in Gray's Inn (St. Thomas) some of the lands have been put into banana cultivation but indications are that a significant amount remain idle."
STILL DECLINING
Information provided by the SIA revealed that in the 1980s, Jamaica had some 45,000 hectares of lands under sugar cultivation. Today, it is under 35,000 hectares and still declining. Whereas there were some 20,000 registered cane farmer 20-years ago, the number is now under 8,000.
Like in the areas around Gray's Inn, where the closure of the factory has significantly impacted the economic life of those communities, the cry is much the same in the communities around other factories such as Monymusk in Clarendon, which is still in operation but has scaled down its operation significantly and at Hampden in Trelawny, where the factory has restructured and some of its lands taken out of sugar.
Under a $370 million restructuring programme launched in 2003, the Hampden Estate, which had 1500 hectares of lands under cane cultivation, subdivided the lands and placed some 200 hectares in mix-crop cultivation under what the Sugar Company of Jamaica (SCJ) president Livingstone Morrison described as, "the commercialisation of the SCJ's crop diversification programme."
The restructuring programme, included an end to the production of sugar, the refurbishing and modernisation of the factory distillery, the introduction of mechanised production technology, an aggressive replanting programme and reform of the cane-farming method.
However, the changes, which required that cane farmers transport their canes over 30-miles away to the Long Pond Estate and the redundancy of some 450 jobs, has left the community facing serious problems brought on by the dislocation experienced.
"What they have done at Hampden is foolishness and it is hurting the community," lamented cane farmer Lynford Heaven. "A lot of persons who were employed to the factory are now out of jobs and most of the small cane farmers have gone out of business because it is not profitable to transport our cane to Long Pond."
The hardship brought on by the closure of sugar factories and in the case of Hampden, the restructuring programmes, has taken some community from a position of economic security to the brink of devastation.
"In some of the areas where factories have been closed and lands taken out of sugar cultivation, it has resulted in a lot of hardship for the people," said Keith Scott, the information planning manager at the SIA, "Sugar was the life blood of some of these communities and it is difficult to se how they will survive without sugar."
The changes at Hampden is already having a significant impact on the community"s primary school, which has seen close to a 50 per cent decline in its student population as a result of displaced sugar workers leaving the area and moving their children to other schools.
"We are now down to about 146 children, which is a lot less than the over 200 children we had three years ago," said acting principal Dawn Gordon. "We now have less people coming into the area to work at the factory so we have less children coming to us."
Faced with the eminent closer of the Long Pond Sugar Estate, Fernandez Smith, the councillor for the Sherwood Division of the Trelawny Parish Council, is predicting that some communities in the parish's sugar belt will be wiped out as a result of the expected mass unemployment.
"To close Long Pond would be the mother of all evil as it would kill communities such as Sherwood, Kinloss, Clarke's Town and so many of the other small communities in the area," said Mr. Smith. "The supermarkets, the hardware store and just about every business in these parts depends on the proceeds of sugar to survive. I fear for the future of these people."
But, despite the bleak prospects facing the ordinary sugar workers with the expected fallout from changes to the European Union sugar protocol, government seems optimistic about the industry.
Last October, Prime Minister P.J. Patterson announced that the future of the sugar industry will revolve around a new three-prong restructuring strategy, which entails the production of raw sugar, molasses and ethanol.
The government has projected an annual production target of 200,000 tonnes of raw sugar, 130,000 tonnes of molasses and up to 70 million litres of hydrated ethanol for the next four years, which if realised, would bring tremendous earnings to the country.
