According to the South Africa-based Business Day, the plan—which will be before the European Union council of ministers for approval in November—will cost these sugar-producing countries $490 million a year.

Workers in the sugar industry will be the most affected. “Their jobs are at stake,” Komal Chand, leader of the union that represents 20,000 Guyanese sugar workers, told the Financial Times. “We feel that we have been betrayed.”

At the July Group of Eight summit, leaders of the most powerful imperialist countries pompously announced plans to cancel the foreign debt owed by 18 of the world’s least developed nations. Guyana, one of the 18, was to see a cut of about $9 million in annual debt service costs. The sugar price cut, however, will wipe out about $40 million a year in income from the country, outstripping any “debt relief.”

Sugar production in Caribbean countries has fallen by more than 50 percent the last two decades, declining from 11 percent of world output in 1985 to 3 percent in 2003. The sugar industry, however, remains a key component of the economies of many of these countries. The state-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation maintains a network of health clinics and helps pay for drainage and irrigation projects. “If we didn’t have sugar we would have flooding every year,” Guyanese president Bharrat Jagdeo told the New York Times. Jamaica has 40,000 sugar workers, but another 200,000 jobs are related to production of this crop.

The price cut can mean the “death knell” for sugar production in Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, the Times noted.

Among the nations most impacted in Africa are Mauritius, Malawi, Swaziland, and Mozambique.

The crisis in the sugar industry of semicolonial countries stems from the protectionist measures of the U.S. and European Union governments. These include subsidizing the production of sugar in their own countries, imposing tariffs on imports, and dumping surpluses on the world market, which contributes substantially to the depression of world sugar prices.

Despite low wages for sugar workers in the Caribbean, the cost of production there is substantially higher than the world market price. “Whereas Brazil and Australia can produce raw sugar for less than 7 U.S. cents per lb,” reports the Times, “Guyana’s most efficient factories can produce sugar at about 18 cents per lb and costs elsewhere in the Caribbean can be much higher. In some Jamaican state-owned factories, costs are as high as 40 cents per lb, about five times the world price.” In the United States, government subsidies maintain sugar prices at about 21 cents a pound.  
 
 
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