By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Apr 22 2001 (IPS)

People’s National Party (PNP) parliamentarian Charles Learmond is anticipating a huge shake-up in the ailing sugar industry that could cost 90 percent of his constituents their livelihoods.

In this southwest part of the parish of Clarendon the main employers are the rum, sugar, banana, and bauxite industries. The first three are in decline and the last requires a highly skilled labour force that he says is not available from the existing labour pool.

Learmond is seeking land and other opportunities for his constituents, as are the other Members of Parliament (MPs) in the sugar belt regions that include 12 of the 14 parishes in this northern Caribbean island. The industry employs some 39,000 people.

Those who get land may not be able to plant cane, however, as many of the small farmers who provide over 54 percent of the island’s sugarcane crop are going out of business because of the high cost of inputs and the low international prices. Sugarcane sells on the international market for 32 cents a pound.

What happens next could be the biggest political and socio- economic fallout here since the 1938 riots and labour strikes that led to the birth of political parties and labour unions, says Mike Henry, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) MP whose constituency adjoins Learmond’s.

According to Henry, it is the low skilled and low paid people from the political grass roots that will be most affected and the loss of their livelihood will lead to serious political problems.

Low pay and squalid living conditions have kept industry workers in “a time warp of poverty” Henry said. But, he added: “Government would be committing political suicide if the industry fails and successive governments have been unwilling to face this. As a result, sugar is still stuck in an era where trade unions and political parties are instruments of power”.

Brascoe Lee a senior member of the third political party here, the National Democratic Movement (NDM), shares this view.

“Sugar was the reason Britain held on to Jamaica for as long as they did. It fed slavery and it won the island a self-governing assembly. It was also where the labour movement began, what started the two main political parties and the affiliated unions in Jamaica and it never changed,” Lee said.

The divestment of the industry in 1994 was, in the government’s words, to give the “stake holders” – in this context, the small farmers – a say in their future. Under the divestment programme, sugar lands were to be divided between the farmers and the estates.

But it never worked that way. Farmers complained that the process was slow and that the lands they got were marginal at best, with poor roads and irrigation networks. The estates on the other hand said farmers failed to acquire the lands as agreed and that crops were poor, because farmers did not practise good crop management.

But there was another twist.

The All Island Cane Farmers’ Association (ALLCANE) said the millions in loans available after divestment to improve crops and machinery gave the new owners confidence to try eliminating small farmers from the industry.

According to Chairman Abaijah Buchanan, the estates withdrew services traditionally provided to farmers including the collection of loan payments on behalf of lending institutions.

He also said that the organisations that once gave farmers loans on the security of their crops, changed the rules and demanded titles as collateral. This made it impossible for large numbers of small farmers to access loans as many cultivate lands that fall outside the Registration of Land and Titles Act.

While the Percival Patterson administration tries to fulfil its promise to provide titles for all, Buchanan wants a return to the arrangement where a farmer could get a loan against his crop. That is in the pipeline, the Agriculture Ministry says.

The divestment was not a total failure, however, as the three factories that had remained in government hands have seen some refurbishing and the estates have been partially mechanised. But there are still many problems in the industry which could force the country out of the international arena, ALLCANE says.

The labour intensive methods, ageing machinery and what Henry terms the “ill advised” negotiations by unions, mean Jamaica produces sugar at 12 cents above world market prices of 32 cents a pound. Last year the country produced 215,966 tonnes, some 50,000 tonnes less than needed to meet its US and EU quotas and maintain domestic demand.

By next year, Jamaica will have lost the protected European market that gave the island a guaranteed price for its sugar. With the industry already experiencing a shortage of cane, Lee believes new products and markets may be the alternatives.

Local sugar baron Robert Clarke believes the biggest problem in the industryá is government interference.

Clarke also called “Busha”, supported the private sector group that handed back the divested factories to the government in 1998, complaining that there was not enough money to run them as profitable concerns. The group wanted the government to step in and provide them with more money.

While Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke (no relation) awaits a report that will determine the viability of sugar, Busha believes government should hand the industry over to the private sector with enough money to fund its modernisation, then get out. Under the divestment programme the government had hovered over the industry trying to ensure that small farmers got a fair deal.

But there are those who believe that the government has already given the private sector too much money and too many chances. Henry for example, thinks the government has already spent enough on the failing industry.

But Minister Clarke is insistent that sugar cannot fail because it would cause a collapse of the socio-economic structure in cane belt communities.

Henry, whose constituency is in the middle of the cane belt and has seen the closure of two factories says the Minister could be wrong. “In over 300 years no government thought of setting up sugar towns that could serve as barometers of the industry’s success or failure,” he said.

Local sugar estates have been losing money for as long as anyone can recall. But there is one exception: Busha Clarke’s own factory, Worthy Park, in the hilly regions of St. Catherine.

Like all estates there are cattle and, uniquely for Worthy Park, citrus. Located in what ALLCANE describes as “one of the most difficult areas to plant cane” the factory consistently makes a profit even while continuing the assistance other factories refused their farmers.

According to Busha Clarke, success lies in keeping farmers happy by working with government to maintain roads, to provide fertilisers and other inputs as a loan and continuing to make deductions for loan repayments from crop payments which allows farmers to access loans without collateral. Worthy Park buys up to 70 percent of its cane from small farmers.

Worthy Park holds the record for consistently getting the best cane to sugar conversion ratio and pays some of the best crop prices, and is a good example of how the industry should be run, Andrew Wright, cane farmer and ALLCANE officer said.

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