Sunday Observer reporter Arlene Martin-Wilkins went into the cane fields of Monymusk in Clarendon last week to talk to the real people whose lives will be changed forever if British farm ministers give the nod, in November, to the European Union’s proposal for a 39 per cent cut in the price of sugar supplied by Jamaica and other ACP countries.

Most of the field workers were uneducated and their immediate challenge was scratching out a living from cane, the only job they have ever had.

MONYMUSK, Clarendon – Barefoot, permanently bent at the waist from almost 40 years of pulling up weeds and swinging a machete in the cane fields of Monymusk, Clarendon, 54-year-old Delci Henry doesn’t even know the European Union exists.

She doesn’t know it, but the bulk of Jamaica’s sugar exports go to the EU. Over the last five years, 741,028 tonnes of locally-produced sugar worth US$385.1 million (J$23.49 billion) were shipped to Europe. During that time, cane cutters like Delci helped sugar estates reap 87,500 acres (51.1 per cent) of the 171,100 acres of cane harvested across the island.

But Delci has no idea that the job she has had ever since she was 15 years old may grind to a halt if the EU successfully pushes through a 39 per cent cut in the price it pays for sugar from Jamaica and other sugar-producing nations in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group.

If implemented, the EU price cut will change a system that has granted preferential treatment to ACP countries for as long as the 54-year-old woman has been working in the fields.

It will translate into a 40 per cent cut in income over the next four years and if the sugar industry buckles under the pressure, she will be among the 40,000 directly-employed cane workers in rural Jamaica that may be left without jobs.

“If the cuts are going to amount to anywhere above 20 per cent, we are going to be in serious trouble and there will be closures in the industry,” warned Allan Rickards, the chairman of the All-Island Cane Farmers’ Association (AICFA).

“Worthy Park (a privately-run operation) has said quite clearly – and this is the most efficient operation in the country – that they cannot live with a cut that is more than 20 per cent,” he added.

“If it comes to a situation where the cuts are so drastic that closures have to take place, there is going to be a severe fall-out in unemployment. And no matter how much redundancy is paid to workers, it’s going to be very traumatic, especially in the traditional cane-growing areas.”

Technically skilled workers have a chance to be absorbed in the expanding bauxite industry, Rickards said, but he conceded that small-scale farming in domestic crops was among the limited choices that would be available to workers like Delci who are at the bottom of the sugar industry ladder.

“This is my first job, mi neva do nutten else,” Delci told the Sunday Observer as she skillfully pulled at weeds in the cane fields last Tuesday. The crop season is over now, but the weeds keep her busy enough.

In a country where the average unemployment rate has been 14.8 per cent over the last 10 years, the middle-aged, uneducated woman is glad she has a job.

Last week, with her machete in her right hand, a wooden stick for support in the left, she chopped at the weeds with a force that belied her small frame.

She appeared oblivious to the stench of the stagnant water that had settled in the field and was seeping between her bare toes. The cane fields are her life, she said, the only work for someone like her who has never gone to school and grew up seeing her mother cutting cane.

“A mi likkle wuk dis, mi nah go fine nutten else fi do ’cause nobody else nah go employ mi,” she said.

Her eight-hour long days begin with the rising sun each weekday during the season. A razor-sharp machete, a bag with a home-made lunch and a bottle of water are the tools that she relies on to take her through the normally long, hot days.

Delci is among many middle-aged and elderly Clarendon residents – some of them now grand and great-grandparents – whose entire lives have revolved around sugar, just like their grand and great-grandparents before them who also struggled for years to “make ends meet”.

The first of 10 children, Delci was first drafted into the cane fields to fill a gap left during one of her mother’s many pregnancies. The 15-year-old got her own job at Monymusk after her mother went back to work.

“When she come back, mi jus’ sign on an’ continue work in a di field,” said Delci. In those days, cane cutters’ wages ranged from five to 10 shillings,

barely enough to eke out a meagre living.

Today things are not much better, as cane cutters still sit at the bottom of the income scale. They get the minimum wage, $2,400 a week minus statutory deductions.

For some of the younger parish residents, who have seen Delci and others labour all day in the cane field then return to ramshackle wooden shacks owned by the Sugar Company of Jamaica, they would prefer to starve than cut cane.

Some have described the conditions, peppered by the use of words like “Busha” and the “great house”, as modern-day slavery.

“Mi would a neva go in a cane field because yuh haffi do too much wuk fi nutten,” said one man, who asked not to be named.

He wasn’t any better dressed than Delci and appeared to be unemployed.

He is not happy with his life and he blames the cane fields. His mother took him to the fields, he said, and never sent him to school.

“Every day mi haffi hol’ on pon har skirt tail inna di cane field and dat is why mi vex now because mi don’t kno’ nutten ’cause mi neva go a school,” he said.

But for cane cutters like 56-year-old Lenora Wright, Lauris Bandoo, 62, and newcomer Patricia Williams, 35, who worked in the sweltering heat beside Delci last week, cane is their life. They will continue chopping cane “until better come”, they said.

“Better mus’ come one day,” Williams said. She appeared to be trying to convince herself.

Now, they take it one day at a time, living from pay day to pay day.

“Although it tough, wi can look forward to ‘pay bill’ on Thursdays,” said Wright and Bandoo. Like Delci, they were oblivious to the EU’s proposed price cut and the threat it poses to their way of live.

The price change will be implemented over four years, starting with a six per cent reduction in 2006, a minimal price cut a year later and a walloping 20 per cent in 2008, then the final cut in 2009.

The EU has offered a euro 40 million (US$48 million) compensation package to the affected countries to cushion the effects of the price cuts, a proposal that has not been well received by ACP countries that have the next four months to persuade the EU to put forward a better deal.

The aid group Oxfam, meanwhile, has called for at least euro 500 million (US$600 million) a year in compensation for the 18 poor sugar-exporting nations that will be affected by the EU price cut.

But that will likely be little comfort for people like Delci and her friends who have given so much of their lives to cane.

“If there is anything like the closure of a factory or a few factories we are going to find, suddenly, a whole set of people are going to be on the (job) market,” said Rickards. “Can you imagine Lionel Town if Monymusk closes? Even if you train people, what would be there to employ them?”

He added: “The question that one has to ask is, ‘why wasn’t it foreseen before that this diversification had to take place?’. And the answer is quite simple, ‘because as far as quite a few influential people are concerned they are quite ambivalent to the sugar industry, and really what they want to do is build houses on the choicest land’.”