SUNS  4361 Wednesday 27 January 1999

Jamaica: When mechanisation from the backend fails



Kingston, Jan 25 (IPS/Vivienne Siva) - Replacing men with machines was supposed to solve some of the many problems which have been plaguing the sugar industry for decades.

After all, the problem of the many work stoppages by employees of large estates to press demand for higher wages and better working conditions would be eliminated. The argument for bringing mechanical harvesters to the sugar estates got even stronger when the age of cane cutters was brought into play.

Dawn Carol, a cane farmer from St Catherine, the parish which adjoins Kingston, estimates that the average age of a cutter is about 55 years. "Young people are not interested. The work is dirty and hard and the pay is really not great," she says.

Jacob Hudson, a cane cutter for more than 40 years says it is the nature of the job and the low pay that are turning young people from the field. "It's not nice. Sometimes the field full of weeds and have Cow Itch (a weed that produces severe itching and bruising on the skin). Sometimes the fields them have plenty water and the work is hard. You cut from day light to night and you get a $1,000 for the week ($27.43 U.S.). It very hard," he says.

The industry rate for cane cutters is $2.60 per tonne.  But Derrick Campbell a small farmer from Trelawny says last year he was forced to pay close to 4.39 to his cane cutter. "It was my turn to
deliver the cane to the factory. The fields had been burnt and when the cutter came he just looked at me and said I had to pay more or he would leave the field. I had no choice but to pay at a higher rate or risk not getting my cane cut and seeing my cane spoilt."

Cane that is burnt has to be reaped and delivered to the factory within 72 hours. After that it becomes stale. Stale cane is vulnerable to a bacteria called dextron. Dextron affects the sugar quality and  importers like the United States impose huge fines for high dextron levels in sugar. So the government figured that mechanical harvesters would solve some of those problems. Observers say they probably solved one set but created many others.

"We have not reached the stage where it (mechanical harvesting) is being done properly," Agriculture Minister Roger Clarke said recently. He was speaking after seeing the amount of cane destroyed by mechanical harvesters that were used on some fields at the island's largest sugar
estate, Frome, in the parish of Westmoreland.

After a tour of a field at the estate, Clarke acknowledged that the industry had approached mechanisation the wrong way. "We have really begun mechanisation from the backend. We did not  really lay down our fields to deal with full mechanisation," he said.

On that field it was estimated that as much as 10% of the cane was lost as a result of poor planning.

Paul Reeson, a manager at Frome says while the field viewed by Clarke was not typical of fields where harvesters will be used,  he agrees that the cane loss was significant. He says cane loss to mechanical harvesters averages 1 to 1.5 tonnes per hectare while in that particular field it was estimated that the loss was in the region of 2 to 2.5 tonnes.

Opponents of mechanical harvesters say even losses of 1 to 1.5 tonnes of sugar cane per hectare is much too high for a country that is struggling to keep the sugar industry alive. Over the years the
island's sugar production has declined  significantly. In the 1960s Jamaica produced in excess of 500,000 tonnes of sugar annually. For many years since then the country has been barely able to meet its export quota of 220,000 tonnes.

Frome's parent company the Sugar Company of Jamaica has invested  heavily in mechanising. There are eight mechanical harvesters, which were purchased at a cost of some $1.5 million each.

One sixth, or some 800 hectares, of Frome's fields have been prepared for the harvesters. Mechanical harvesters will reap some 15 percent of the estate's canes. Lands on which mechanical harvesters are to be used need to be  "table top" flat which in some instances require extensive
earth movement, and can cost up to 20% more to prepare than the traditional manually cut lands.

Farmers like Mark Brooks of the Richmond Farms in St. Ann, agree that the country has approached the issue of mechanical harvesting the wrong way. "We talk about the land preparation being wrong but we have not adapted the machines to suit our needs," he says. Adapting and building machines to suit the specification of his farm is what Brooks practices.

His emphasis is also on the maintenance of these machines and equipment to ensure that they last. Brooks points to the Australian experience. Not only has Australia built the harvesters to suit their purposes but the country has also developed the variety of sugar cane best suited for mechanical harvesters.

"In the 1950s, Jamaica and Australia were virtually on par in terms of sugar production. Now Australia is so far ahead and we are struggling,"  Brooks says.

Sugar cane is the main agricultural crop in Jamaica. The industry  employs directly and indirectly some 60,000 persons. It contributes in the region of $100 million each year to the economy, making it the third largest earner of foreign exchange behind tourism and bauxite.

Commercial production of sugar in Jamaica dates back to the mid-17th century after the English took over the island from the Spanish in 1655 and for centuries until the mid 1950s sugar dominated the economic and social life of this Caribbean island.