PORTVALE FACTORY in St James remained silent yesterday following the breakdown of talks between the Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) and the Barbados Workers Union (BWU) to end a now five-day-old strike.
When a DAILY NATION team visited the factory, workers were sitting, eating or playing dominoes as work remained stalled.
One major concern was whether the cane would be of any use in sugar production, given its shelf life of about a week before it was only useful for the making of molasses. According to the workers, longer stalks of cut canes had a better chance of staying viable for a longer time after being harvested than those that were chopped into several pieces by the mechanical harvesters.
But eventually, they explained, all the harvested cane would start to ferment, “smoke” and emit a pungent odour, also becoming a fire risk as heat built up in the piles, increasing the chances of spontaneous combustiom from exposure to direct sunlight.
