The historical significance of the 2024 sugarcane harvest in the nearly 400-year story of this nation is not lost on us. For the first time, the workers who have laboured to plant, harvest, and process the crop into sugar and molasses have an ownership stake in the means of production.
The transition from the state-owned Barbados Agricultural Management Company (BAMC) to the new cooperatively-owned Agricultural Business Company Ltd. (ABC) and Barbados Energy and Sugar Company Inc.(BESCO) represents a monumental shift in an industry once dominated by the planter class, capital’s entrenched interests, and the long bitter struggle of labour for dignity, humanity and improvement.
This struggle by sugar workers and their union to wrest greater control, better working conditions, and fairer compensation from the plantocracy that extracted forced labour for centuries and then paid a fixed pittance for another century after emancipation cannot be ignored or romanticised. Time and again, the success of cooperative economics in Barbados – from free villages and ‘meeting turns’ to multi-million dollar credit unions – has repelled the collective amnesia and received wisdom among both the dominant and subordinate classes of indolent and indifferent workers keen only to consume not produce.
Already, some have sought to use the bumpy start to this historic crop, marred by trucking delays, lack of communication with workers over rehiring, and some apparent operational hiccups, to undermine this momentous transition before it even began in earnest. As we have previously urged, the new cooperative owners must learn from the top-down, master-servant management dynamic of old and operate with full transparency and open communication with their worker-owners and the public. Staying out of the public glare on day one of the crop and declarations that a ‘privately-owned’ business will not subject itself to regular media scrutiny chips away at the very egalitarian ideals the cooperative model embodies.
The success of sugar’s new cooperative enterprises rests on embracing its workers not just as hired hands, but as trusted partners with a vested stake in the sugar industry’s revival. Cooperatives only function when all members have a true voice and a seat at the table. Leadership must be accountable to the worker-owners to ensure this transformative shift represents a real revolutionary change, not simply new management doling out the same old disrespectful treatment to those who keep the flywheel turning.
The sugar industry is not a one-door shop. It remains integral to the ecology, climate, land use and socioeconomic prospects.
Nonetheless, we accept that shedding the legacy of management styles carried over from the planter regime will not happen overnight. But these cooperatives’ founding principles demand it confront that historical baggage directly and build an enterprise founded on dignity, equity and economic democracy for its workers. Just as any progressive Fortune 500 chief executive embraces communication, inclusive decision-making, and empowerment using the lens of history, the general running the industry today would profit from historical analysis rather than convenient amnesia that often afflicts many Barbadians.
For nearly four centuries, sugar defined the island’s economic and social system, creating immense wealth for the planter elite through the boundless exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants. The cooperatively-owned model enshrines those very descendants as part-owners with a real stake in the industry their ancestors built through coerced labour.
Great peril, but also great promise, lies ahead for this fledgling cooperative enterprise. For the sugar industry’s revolutionary turn to truly mean something, field workers, factory staff and all employee-owners must have a voice in shaping this new cooperative vision. It cannot be cooperatively owned in name only.
Beyond just transforming the labour dynamics, the new cooperative model holds great promise for modernising and diversifying the sugar industry into sustainable energy production as well. Both the cooperatively-owned ABC firm and the private BSIL farmers have begun planting new varieties of sugarcane designed to maximise both sugar and biomass output for renewable electricity generation. Marrying sugar with bioenergy is a sensible return to the best part of this historic industry. Rather than remaining stagnant, the cooperatives are embracing innovation to make sugarcane cultivation a linchpin of our transition to a greener economic future.
We also welcome the new cooperatives’ aim to boost domestic supply, increase exports, and hopefully drive down consumer prices through more market competition. After years of the state-owned factory selling to a single buyer at a steep discount, the new enterprises can finally capture more value and reinvest profits back into the industry and its employee-owners. This is action that aligns with the incentives of workers and management in a way that can not only revitalise but sustain sugar production for decades to come.
We regret to note the muted response, if not outright scepticism, from the remnants of the old planter class towards this revolutionary new direction cannot be ignored. The transition to the new cooperatives was met by the deafening but telling silence of the Barbados Sugar Industry Limited’s private growers – many of whom inherited the capital, land, and economic power directly from the colonial planters of old. This silence speaks volumes about their lack of enthusiasm for real systemic change. After the decades-long battles against the unions that laid the inevitable groundwork for this very upheaval, we would urge greater cooperation and patience rather than the ‘I-told-you-so’ reaction to the harvest’s growing pains.
BSIL’s focus on narrow operational details like trucking schedules and harvest timelines, rather than wholeheartedly welcoming an ownership model that empowers those who turn the canes into sugar, betrays a reluctance to cede control over their long-held economic privileges.
If the new cooperatives are to truly revolutionise the sugar industry, they must directly confront any lingering obstinacy and resistance from the rump planter class. Just as they overturned old injustices, they must also repudiate the mindsets, prejudices and entitled mentalities that allowed such exploitation to endure for decades after the institution of slavery was abolished. But cooperatively-owned Bajan Sugar can only realise its full transformative potential by giving no quarter to the legacy it has overcome – while learning from that history to become an innovative, inventive and caring industry for the future.
That future can be sweet for all, if it so chooses.
Â
