Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company (HC&S) is facing a $30 million revenue loss from 2015 with worse projections to come, says The Guardian. The company plans to cut 650 jobs at the end of the year, but the bad news is also a sign that after 150 years, sugar is no longer king of the islands. As the industry fades, sustainable agriculture advocates are battling with agribusiness companies like HC&S and Monsanto over the future of farming in Hawaii.
“Despite HC&S claims that they are researching diverse agricultural models to replace sugar, the fear among many who see the island’s future as being organic and closer to the traditional Hawaiian concept of Aina (‘that which feeds us’) is that Monsanto will end up leasing the redundant fields and growing GMO corn,” says The Guardian. Monsanto is already fighting Maui’s moratorium on GMO production; 90-percent of the seed for American GMO corn originates in Hawaii.
“We don’t want one mono-crop like sugar to be replaced by another like GMO corn. In reality we want diverse agriculture that is organic, rotational and can replenish the soil,” says Kaniela Ing, a Democratic state representative for Maui who chairs the office of Hawaiian affairs.
A recent report, commissioned by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture, called for the state to revise its pesticide rules, urging companies to alert residents when and where sprays are taking place and to build buffer zones around fields. Pesticide regulations on the islands are generally more lax than those on the mainland.
Apart from concern over chemical sprays, small farmers on the islands have long fought the large sugar companies over water. In Maui, much of the water from the eastern half of the island was historically siphoned to sugar plantations. Now farmers are trying to make sure that HC&S’s water rights aren’t made permanent if the company’s land changes hands.
Although activist Tiare Lawrence, a native Hawaiian, says that figuring out who the water belongs to won’t solve everything. “The demise of sugar is [HC&S’] own fault. They will tell you it is because of us fighting them over the water but it’s nothing to do with the water, it’s everything to do with their business model and their archaic farming practices. The health of their soil is terrible, it has no nutrient base. They don’t fallow, they don’t rotate crops, they just burn, till, plant, burn, till, plant.”
For Lawrence and others, Big Ag doesn’t just represent an environmental issue, but also cultural abuse. It was in the name of sugar that native Hawaiians lost land and sovereignty in 1893, during the “illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom,” says The Guardian. For some, returning to more traditional forms of agriculture is a way to regain part of what was lost.