This massive investment in the sugar industry defies logic . . . . The cost of producing sugar on a small island with high labour costs and limited mechanisation is astronomically higher than in Brazil and other major sugar producers . . . . Sugar is so intrinsic to their national identity, however, that Barbadian taxpayers apparently support this fiscal profligacy . . . the Government of Barbados would be better served letting the industry die a peaceful death . . . . – Former United States ambassador Mary “Wikileaked” Kramer
Mary Kramer came to Bim, our sugar cane to bury; if she had tried just one cane piece, she’d have gone home nice and merry . . .
Y’know, Mary, if I came from a country where thousands are homeless and even policemen are losing their jobs, I’d think twice before telling Barbados how to run its economy.
But let’s talk sugar. Why would Barbados want to keep a sugar industry?
Well, first off, there’s history.
We Barbadians discovered sugar cane breeding. We’ve supplied varieties to the world. This little island’s sugar industry built up not only our infrastructure, but massive fortunes in England.
Of course, we also first bred the grapefruit and that’s been taken from us. Cherry, aloe and sea-island cotton carry the “barbadense” tag and we’ve lost them. Now your country boasts a breed called the “American Barbados Black Belly Sheep”. Can’t we at least hold on to sugar?
Secondly, there’s rotation. From what I see on those videos, United States women don’t know much about rotation. But it’s growing crops one after the other to control pests, weeds, replenish the soil. And sugar is our best bet. The trash provides organic matter, smothers weeds. Other crops do much better after a rotation with sugar.
Thirdly, sugar cane is essential to other forms of agriculture and industry. Cane tops are livestock fodder in the dry season. Bagasse is widely used for bedding by poultry producers; it can be incorporated into animal feed. Barbados molasses produces the world’s best rum.
Fourthly, Mary, we like our island looking special. Under sugar cane, it was a well kept garden which visitors admired. Now it’s getting kinda shabby.
When I was a boy at Vaucluse, tourists stopped to take pictures with cane workers. They toured the factories. Sugar keeps us beautiful. Will tourists come here to drive through vast expanses of ugly scrub?
Fifthly, money. Your country, Mary, is addicted to money – “the relentless and practically singleminded pursuit of wealth”, someone called it. It has been your undoing. You put your own people out of work to outsource jobs to Mexico, China and India.
In contrast, Tom Adams could boast that our sugar workers are the highest paid in the region. Whereas in Brazil, which you extol as a low-cost producer, workers exist in virtual or actual slave conditions.
If y’all cared anything about the dignity of human beings, you wouldn’t support such exploitation. But you don’t.
Is it not better that taxpayers’ money be used to help pay sugar workers who produce a crop which saves foreign exchange and beautifies the island, rather than spend it on welfare to people doing nothing or Government workers doing very little?
Nevertheless, Guyana has stuck with sugar and is now reaping the rewards. And when the fickle cruise ships and tourists don’t come, Barbados can still sell every pound of sugar it produces and much of the foreign earnings stay here.
Instead of apologizing for its past, sugar should be seen as a stepping stone to a bright future for the descendants of sugar workers. And the good land now running to bush in the hands of land sharks should be transferred to those who can work it.
And sugar should stop being godfather. It gives away cane tops, passers-by take canes from the fields, bagasse almost free; a gallon of molasses with endless health benefits sells for BDS$1!
How can it make money?
Finally, Mary, had you ever experienced the full totality of a cane piece, you would never like it to end – the sweet smells, the cooling breeze, at one with nature.
