WTO TURNS CANE SUGAR SOUR



Opposition politicians should have the courage to tell former sugar workers and their families that it is the World Trade Organisation with its philosophy of globalisation that has put Trinidad and Tobago’s cane sugar industry to the sword and not the Administration.


They must also say to them that even when Caroni Limited was acquired in 1975 by the Government of late Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams, it was already a losing concern that its then owners, Tate and Lyle, were preparing to shut down solely on economic grounds. They should tell them as well that their take home pay, and ipso facto their severance benefits would have been much higher but for the stubborn refusal of a former trade union leader to accept mechanisation of the sugar cane industry.


Admittedly, it is a difficult thing for them to do, but no more difficult than it must have been for Dr Williams to have urged on Cabinet that it should acquire Caroni at a time when sugar prices on the world market had tumbled from 650 pounds sterling per long tonne in late 1974 to 120 pounds sterling a year later. Dr Williams could have maintained a distance from Caroni, but he understood the massive social dislocation that would have resulted from any closure then of the company.


He preferred to make of it a giant DEWD, or to employ today’s phrasing, Unemployment Relief Programme (URP). For this is what Caroni (1975) Limited was when Government gave its employees, VSEP, a tacit relief programme, despite the 40,000 plus tonnes of raw sugar it sold, annually, to the European Union by way of preferential quota under the Convention of Lome. In addition, it had sold approximately 7,000 tonnes of raw sugar under the United States Sugar Act.


Ironically, it was the effective challenge posed by the United States of America to the preferential entry of Caribbean bananas to the European Union, again under the Convention of Lome, that was an unmistakable signal of US intent to move on similar preferential entry of raw cane sugar to the EU. The eventual publicly voiced move by Brazil and Hawaii should not be allowed to blur the raw cane sugar chapter of history. But whatever nation exploited, whether tacitly or otherwise, the rules and regulations of the World Trade Organisation, the action of questioning the right of preferential entry was inevitable. And although I have reservations, and have expressed them about US attacks on preferential entry, I, nonetheless, respect America’s right to protect the interests of its investors.


Meanwhile, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago would have been able to carry Caroni (1975) Limited for a few years longer, perhaps indefinitely, but for the selfish and shortsighted action of a former President General of the All Trinidad Sugar and General Workers Trade Union, the late Bhadase Sagan Maraj. Let me explain. In 1964, when a crushing frost virtually wiped out Europe’s beet sugar crop and led to the massive jump in cane sugar production at Caroni Limited from the 1963 level of 112,089 tonnes to that of 205,121 tonnes because of the beet sugar shortfall, Caroni increased the number of its cultivation employees from 7,274 to 11,112.


In turn, the total number of man days worked rose from 1,348,667 in 1963 to 2,046.728 in 1965, an increase of more than 50 percent. The total annual earnings of the cultivation workers, and I am quoting from a Memorandum presented by the company to a Tripartite Conference on Unemployment and Underemployment held in July of 1968, amounted to $8,974,329 an increase of more than 70 percent over the previous year’s (1963) figure of $5,111,922.


What was troubling, and this should have been recognised by the Sagan, was that by 1967, what with the recovery of European beet sugar and the consequent drop in the amount of cane sugar produced by Caroni to 177,451 tonnes, the total annual earnings, rather than adjust downward had instead risen to $9,290,594. I wish to make this clear: Nothing that I write here should be misconstrued to mean that I am objecting to the total wages earned by the cultivation workers because they were shockingly small, indeed a mere average daily earning of $5.05!


My quarrel with the shortsightedness of the Sagan lay in his opposition to the increasing use of mechanical harvesters, which while it (the use of harvesters) would have led to the need for fewer cultivation workers would have meant not only increased productivity but considerably higher incomes for the historically advantaged workers, savaged first by slavery, then by indentureship and later by a continuing of low wages long after the 1921 end of indentured labour.


When the question of mechanisation was taken to the Industrial Court, which was established in 1965, Bhadase Sagan Maraj voiced his objections to their use and he and his Union fought against it.


An undoubted part of Bhadase’s reasoning was that had the sugar workers received appreciably more money with the introduction of mechanical harvesters they may not have supported his leadership.


I believe I should provide readers of this column with hard cold facts so that they, along with sugar workers from the 1960s and their children will be in a better position to understand how the cultivation workers remained underpaid. In 1968, a Caroni field worker, sans mechanical harvesters, cultivated an average of five acres per day for a wage of $5.50. In Australia, whose sugar lands were and still are heavily mechanised, a relevant worker cultivated 50 acres a day and received a daily wage of $20. In Hawaii, the sugar worker cultivated 80 acres a day and earned $40 a day.


Admittedly, not all of Caroni’s lands were suited to mechanical harvesters, but had the areas that could have accommodated the machines been harvested by them the average take home pay of cultivation workers would have been substantially higher. Perhaps Opposition United National Congress politicians may wish to think on these things.

Comments

"WTO TURNS CANE SUGAR SOUR"

More in this section