Robert Buddan
We celebrate another year of independence and emancipation assessing once again where we go from here. The agriculture upon which the economy has rested for hundreds of years is facing fundamental and long-term changes. The energy and food crises of today force countries like ours to think about how the energy independence we need and the food dependence we are trapped in are related. Jamaica suffers high levels of dependence on energy and food and our cushion against both is disappearing fast.
Doha Round
The seven-year Doha Round talks on international trade have broken down again and gone with it are prospects for reduced subsidies from northern countries and lower food prices. The UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation will give us US$250,000 to help increase cassava production. This can help food supply and at some future time become a bio-fuels substitute. But at the same time, another historic crop, banana, faces a deep crisis forcing stakeholders to be rushing around to consider its future. At the same Doha Round, Europe decided to make a bigger than expected tariff cut on Latin American bananas, which will reduce the preferential advantage that African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) suppliers enjoy.
All of this comes in the midst of the divestment of five sugar estates that hopefully will end the crisis in that industry. The divestment will not help food security, but will help to reduce energy dependence. It was the best plan for keeping thousands employed too. Phillipe Chalmin's history of Tate and Lyle says that Norman Manley and Alexander Bustamante, our founders of independence, valued the sugar industry more for the jobs it created than the foreign currency earned or its contribution to GDP. Other new and growing industries - bauxite, tourism, and manufacturing - would, they felt, grow the economy and keep foreign exchange coming in. The sugar industry's special role, the role only it could play, was to absorb thousands of workers and bring incomes into numerous rural households.
Sugar and bauxite
An example of the old technology used on sugar estates in times past. - File
The sugar industry did just that. It remained Jamaica's largest employer peaking at nearly 58,000. Bauxite, a pride of independent Jamaica, was a relatively poor employer. It never employed more than 10,000 persons at its peak. But worse, it threatened rural Jamaica. Bauxite companies bought up 190,000 acres between 1943 and 1970. In doing so, they displaced 560,000 rural Jamaicans.
The result was that 163,000 rural Jamaicans abandoned the land and migrated. This was especially true for younger people. By 1985, it was estimated that over 50 per cent of the agricultural labour force was over 50 years old. Between 1943 and 1968, the number of acres under cultivation dropped by 18 per cent. The Jamaican peasantry was migrating and taking its skills with it. Jamaica's dependence on food imports increased over that same period.
Ganja
Our food import bill increased eleven-fold in the two decades after independence, 1960 to 1980. Studies also suggest that ganja production took off as rural people, with less farming skills and land to grow food, tried to supplement their cash crops with income from ganja production. They made it into a multimillion-dollar business by the 1960s.
Even before the full effects of these changes were evident, Manley and Bustamante were at one that the sugar industry's role was, above all else, to provide employment and give rural Jamaicans income and livelihood. Between 1955 and 1965 the single biggest bone of contention between them and Tate and Lyle was mechanisation. The Government and sugar workers were against it because of the jobs that would be lost. Tate and Lyle was for it because it would mean using fewer workers, thus reducing labour costs, and shortening the harvesting season. A sort of compromise was reached. Governments did not provide licences to import sugar cane harvesters, but allowed mechanical loading of canes. It was not good enough for Tate and Lyle. The company started to sell its farms from 1968, just three years after its production peaked to its highest ever.
Saviour
The sugar industry remained Jamaica's largest employer and was the saviour of many a rural community. But it could not sustain the hopes of independence. Its low point came in 2005 when the European Union announced it would not guarantee earlier prices for ACP sugar imports. Almost as soon as this low point was reached the market for the industry took an upward turn. The steady rise of energy prices since 2000 had made ethanol a much-demanded cheaper fuel blend. Jamaica jumped at the opportunity to make production arrangements with an ethanol giant like Brazil. By 2006, it had become public knowledge that Brazil was interested in our sugar estates. Now Infinity Bio-Energy limited (IBE) has bought into the industry.
Integrated rural development
We won't know how well IBE will meet the hopes the country had for the industry at independence. But the minister of agriculture tells us that it will have a community programme that will include health services, housing and sports facilities and will provide financial support for schools and churches. We will have to wait to see how much this community support will amount to but this aspect of the industry must be encouraged. Tate and Lyle's own community programme did not, however, prevent major ghettos and deep poverty from persisting in the environs of opulence at the height of the industry's performance. Its impact on rural development did not go far enough.
Mechanisation
We also hear that IBE will modernise and mechanise the sugar cane industry. This was one of the great failures of the Tate and Lyle management. Governments and trade unions did resist mechanisation to save jobs, but Tate and Lyle was still guilty of bad management decisions and the failure to retool adequately. We will have to see how many jobs remain after the current redundancies. The main objective of the divestment seems not to be employment creation as much as unburdening the state of the industry's debts. We hope IBE will run a modern and efficient operation, reinvest in research and development, and invest in the technology of the industry more than had been done in the past.
The broader objective for the minister should be integrated rural development. The divestment of the sugar industry, at the level of government, must be conceived in terms of the plan for rural development. We have a plan, but we have to make it work by integrating it with industry. This is so especially since banana seems to be heading for a crisis of its own. If we don't make this plan work rural people will continue to migrate. They will take their years of valuable experience and vital farming skills with them.
Food dependency
Squatters who have no such skills will fill the void on the land. Less land will be used to produce food and food dependency will increase even more. Ganja production will rise and so will the associated law and order issues like the ganja-for-guns trade.
The old days of sugar have passed. Government and stakeholders must hold IBE to new standards of community, labour and environment. The new sugar cane industry's life might well depend on how well the industry treats its people. That, after all, was the promise of independence.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm or columns@gleanerjm.com.
