ONE OF THE FEW, but useful, things I have learned about sugar cane since moving to “the country (well, St George) nearly two decades ago, is that the fire engines which are heard racing to cane fires during crop time don’t actually go there to put out the fires, unless they really have to. They turn up in order to keep the fire from spreading to houses and buildings which may be under threat.
Who actually puts out the fire is a guy driving a little go-kart with a small water tank, going around the fire and spraying with water, but allowing the thing to burn out by itself. In other words, the private sector puts out the fire.
This memory, based on a few dramatic times when our house found itself in the vicinity of a few large fires, came back to me as I learned that the Government is now moving to a “direct consumption” model for local sugar, there being little point remaining in following the “sugar for export” model.
In 2008, it was the private sector which came to the rescue of sugar, entering into a joint venture programme with the Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) to form a company called West Indies Sugar Trading Company (WISTCO). This is the company which produces the regular local and premium sugars marketed under the Plantation Reserve label, here and abroad. Mostly abroad, where, we are told, it fetches three times the current world price.
Over the past few years the removal of the European Union’s (EU) subsidies for sugar has made it impossible for Barbados to produce the commodity competitively, and although WISTCO has been going for seven years, the island’s sugar production has still been declining significantly. We are now doing less than 15 000 tonnes per yer, and sugar’s contribution to GDP is now around one per cent, compared to that of tourism, which is over 12 per cent. So it is the private sector which is driving the go-kart containing the premium sugar.
Minister of Agriculture Dr David Estwick said the brand is now vital to the turnaround of the sugar industry. WISTCO, he said, would sell all of the approximately 2 000 tonnes of sugar produced for direct consumption by the BAMC this year, which is around 15 per cent of current annual production. However, he said, sales projections for local consumption and Plantation Reserve sugar to retailers and manufacturers in Barbados, the Caribbean, United Kingdom and European Union were 5 000 tonnes next year and doubling to 10 000 by 2018, and leaping forward to 25 000 tonnes in 2020.
To produce that amount of sugar, he said, 250 000 tonnes of sugar cane must be grown across the island. Said Dr Estwick: “It is expected that this new venture will again show the world the quality of sugar that can be produced right here in Barbados.” It also means that the price of sugar will go up on your local supermarket shelf, since it must be sold at a price that makes it economically viable to produce, which is definitely not the world price.
I have no problem with the price going up, as we consume far too much sugar anyway, leading the Government to put a sin tax on soft drinks, in line with evolving policy in many other countries. We can all just consume less sugar while supporting the industry. But if this country starts to consume only locally made sugar, there will still be one sugar for the exported Plantation Reserve brand and another for the rest of us who will be engaging in “direct consumption”. In fact, the ratio will be something like 99 to one, if we go by WISTCO’s own advertising.
On the website www.bigbarn.co.uk, under the headline “Back In Stock – Plantation Reserve 400g Bags”, we learn just how special this product is and how selective the people are who make it: “We take only the very best canes at the height of the harvest to produce Plantation Reserve – less than one in a hundred is good enough for the purity of cane juice required. The selected canes are gently crushed and filtered at our mill in the parish of St. James. Our expert pan boilers then traditionally mill the resulting juice for three times longer than ordinary cane sugar.”
It sounds so delicate that I imagine them sipping wine and listening to Yanni while they are working. But you see what I mean? The exported version is the one per cent, and we are the 99 per cent. Still, even if the best canes go into the export version, the remaining ones that missed the cut will produce better sugar than the stuff we usually have to buy, often from a friendly country in Central America.
We have had to put up with the horror because our politicians all the way back to the Owen Arthur administration refused to bite the bullet and say: “Look, we are finished importing sugar, so we will make enough for both local and export demand”.
The higher price the locals paid would have helped bail out the industry, whose “sugar for export” model led to the operation of the law of diminishing returns – as Europe paid less, we made less. And even when the Plantation Reserve brand came on the market, it was left to almost die a low death locally because right next to it was the cheaper imported sugar which the sameGovernment had brought in so as not to upset local consumers.
Not even the loss of the subsidised price could arouse us from our sugar induced coma. That is only happening now when the industry itself is threatened with extinction, and the sugar fields, which add to the beauty of our countryside, with disastrous erosion.