Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

[evanovitch]

Government has signed documents marking the official start of the divestment of state-run sugar factories.

The signing of the Heads of Agreement between the government, led by Prime Minister Bruce Golding and Brazilian company Infinity Bio-Energy, took place at Jamaica House Friday morning, three days earlier than scheduled.

While the documents signed on Friday are not the final sale agreement, <span style="font-weight: bold">the official hand over of the five state-run factories at Frome, Moneymusk, Bernard Lodge, Long Pond and Duckenfield is now set for October 30.</span>

In the meantime, the Sugar Corporation of Jamaica (SCJ) will continue to manage the entities to ensure out-of-crop repairs and maintenance are carried out.

Officials from Infinity are also expected to establish a presence in the factories in the interim to ensure that the transition is smooth and production for the next crop is assured.

A source said the Heads of Agreement outlines the various processes to be followed and requirements which have to be met by the Brazilian company before the factories change hands.

However, at least one sector player said Infinity BioEnergy, which was the sole bidder of eight entities that were pre-qualified, is the best choice to revamp the sector at this time.

Chairman of the All Island Cane Farmers Association, Alan Rickards was optimistic about the divestment, which comes after a long and tedious attempt to resuscitate the sector.

Friday's signing of the Heads of Agreement, which was done in the presence of the sector's trade unions, took place without the media present, which raised a few eyebrows.

Reports are emerging about the inevitable redundancies and this is said to be high on the agenda in coming months as the details are worked out.

Mr. Rickards said he is confident that this will be done transparently and efficiently ahead of the hand-over deadline.

It is expected that some of the employees will be re-hired by the new owners.

[evanovitch]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

end of an era, the sugar plantation and the whole processing of sugar in a sense by Jamaicans of a form...irony is dat Brazil of all countries, wid fi dem brutality an attitude towards slaves during the era and den to former slaves, r the ones who getting the biz...life funny fi real...but a so di ting set...

[Dr.Dudd]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

It shows that slavery still is profitable even today.
Wel at least rhey won't own the lands.

[Tuff Gong]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">It shows that slavery still is profitable even today.
Wel at least rhey won't own the lands. </div></div>
...almost any entity from any country that would have bought the Sugar Factory is connected to Slavery of the past. I don't think the Brazilian Government is involved in this deal and I don't see how without specifics Infinity could be tied to slavery.

It is almost like saying once you are from Brazil then you are party to slavery.
Once you in any way shape of form connected to Sugar Cane, then you are a slave master/holder.
It would be very interesting if I could find those pictures from the Observer articles that I had posted a few years back that contrasted the dwellings of the Cane Cutters and Sugar workers to the appointments of their 21st Centaury Masters and see how far removed we were from the conditions and culture of slavery.

[evanovitch]

New labour agreement signed for sugar workers


Stakeholders in the sugar industry have signed a new two year collective labour agreement.

The agreement was signed by the management of the Sugar Industry Authority of Jamaica, Sugar Industry Research Institute and the National Workers Union, on behalf of several groups of workers in the industry.

The agreement is retroactive to April 1 this year and expires on March 31 2010.

It provides for a 15% increase on basic salary as of April this year and an additional 7% in April next year.

Under the agreement, workers will also receive a lunch subsidy of $250 per day in year one and $266 daily in year two.

In addition, the agreement stipulates that an out of base meal allowance of $347 per day be paid in year one and this figure increases to $372 per day in year two.

The workers will also get a crop bonus of 2% on annual gross earnings in year one of the agreement.

Quality Control and Regulatory officers will also receive a 46% duty allowance.

The National Workers Union said the agreement brings to an end all the negotiations with the sugar sector over the next two years and it will now focus on the proposed divestment of the sugar factories.

[Dr.Dudd]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Tuff Gong</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">It shows that slavery still is profitable even today.
Wel at least rhey won't own the lands. </div></div>
...almost any entity from any country that would have bought the Sugar Factory is connected to Slavery of the past. I don't think the Brazilian Government is involved in this deal and I don't see how without specifics Infinity could be tied to slavery.

It is almost like saying once you are from Brazil then you are party to slavery.
Once you in any way shape of form connected to Sugar Cane, then you are a slave master/holder.
It would be very interesting if I could find those pictures from the Observer articles that I had posted a few years back that contrasted the dwellings of the Cane Cutters and Sugar workers to the appointments of their 21st Centaury Masters and see how far removed we were from the conditions and culture of slavery.
</div></div>

Brazil 'slavery' damned by report

By Steve Kingstone
BBC correspondent in Sao Paulo


At least 25,000 people are working as slave labourers in Brazil, according to a new report obtained by the BBC.
The study, carried out on behalf of the International Labour Organization, says workers are living in conditions unfit for animals.

The bulk of them are working in the Amazon region, clearing forest so the land can be used for cattle and crops.

The as yet unpublished report says members of the political elite are among the landowners responsible.

'Hovels'

In 21st Century Brazil workers are being treated not like animals, but worse than animals - that is the stark finding of this report, commissioned but not yet published by the ILO.


Many slaves are used to clear Amazonian land for cultivation
It says forced labour is concentrated in the Amazon, where workers are clearing huge swathes of rainforest to make way for cattle and crops, notably soya.

The working day lasts from dawn until dusk. Those involved live in hovels; they eat from tin cans previously used to hold pesticides.

Often the labourers are in debt to their employers who hire gunmen to ensure order and prevent escapes.

The report says that in the Amazon state of Para, more than 500 rural workers have been killed over the past 30 years. That is a murder rate 26 times the national average.

Politicians and judges

The report does praise efforts by Brazil's left-wing government to tackle the issue, but it says a culture of impunity persists where politicians and judges are among the landowners responsible for perpetuating slave labour.

A whole series of proposed laws remain unratified by the Brazilian parliament.

Indirectly the ILO is itself also a target in this report for failing to help bring about change.

But an ILO spokesman denied the study was being suppressed.

He said it would be published at a later date as part of a broader international report on slave labour.



E-mail this to a friend

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3908271.stm

[Dr.Dudd]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com



Slave ethanol?
Amnesty International: forced labor in Brazil's sugarcane fields
Posted by Tom Philpott at 4:58 PM on 30 May 2008
Read more about: Brazil | agriculture | ethanol | energy | environmental justice
Tools: print | email | + digg | + del.icio.us | + reddit | + stumbleupon
As the case for corn-based ethanol unravels, a lot of pundits and green-minded investors have settled on a new panacea: ethanol from sugar cane, which thrives in the tropics.

Thomas Friedman has been blustering about it for years now; Richard Branson recently hinted he might start investing in it.

Sugarcane is a deeply ironic crop on which to hang a &quot;sustainable energy revolution.&quot; Historically, the spread of sugarcane in Caribbean islands and South America involved vast clear-cutting of coastal forests.

Socially, its legacy may be worse. To run the bustling cane plantations of the Americas during the colonial period, European powers relied on ruthlessly exploited African slaves.

Still a highly labor-intensive crop, cane evidently remains under the shadow of that atrocious past. Even today, Brazil's much-heralded ethanol miracle is built on the backs of &quot;forced&quot; cane workers. From a Reuters story:


Amnesty International criticized poor working conditions and forced labor in Brazil's fast-growing sugar cane sector on Wednesday, as the government tries to promote the cane-based ethanol industry as a way to reduce poverty.
Sometimes the circumstances involved not cane fields, but ethanol refineries:

Amnesty said that in March 2007, 288 workers were rescued from forced labor at six cane plantations in Sao Paulo state, and 409 workers from an ethanol distillery in Mato Grosso do Sul state.
It goes on:

In November 2007, inspection teams found 831 indigenous cane cutters working in poor conditions, also in Mato Grosso do Sul, while over 1,000 people &quot;in conditions analogous to slavery&quot; were released in June from a sugar plantation in Para state.
Amnesty claims that Brazil's official response to the problem has often been &quot;symbolic&quot; at best. &quot;Clearly resources are limited, areas are huge, and the number of companies in this sector is expanding in an alarming way,&quot; an Amnesty researcher told Reuters.

It's important to note that these aren't isolated incidents. Brazil's cane-ethanol industry thrives in global markets in no small part due to the &quot;comparative advantage&quot; of a large and unprotected workforce. From a 2006 Land Research Action Network report:

After Australia, Brazil has the lowest cost of production of sugar in the world because it exploits workers. In the state of São Paulo, the cost of production is $165 dollars per ton. In the European Union the cost is $700 dollars per ton.
Now highly mechanized, the cane industry still requires seasonal bursts of hand labor -- and offers little or no work in down times. And like U.S. vegetable farms, can plantations rely on great influxes of migrant labor. Land Research Action Network again:

These workers often begin their activities in debt. One of the frequent debts encountered before beginning work is with transportation (usually clandestine, called &quot;excursions&quot that costs on average R$200.00 per worker migrating from the Northeast to São Paulo. The migrant workers are seduced by &quot;cats&quot; or &quot;coyotes&quot; who are usually the owners of the buses which make the journey.

In the sugarcane regions, so-called &quot;dormitory cities&quot; have increased, where migrant workers live in tenement houses, or overcrowded barracks, without ventilation or minimal hygienic conditions. Despite their precarious situation, the cost of housing and food for sugarcane workers is much higher than the average paid by the local population.
I wish Thomas Friedman -- next time he's in Brazil chatting up cab drivers, development gurus, and ethanol execs -- would go spend the night in one of these dreadful barracks, and then turn in a shift in a cane field (where he'd earn about a buck for every ton of cane he harvested, Land Research Action reports). The experience may add a bit of pique to his next gurglings about the genius of cane ethanol.




For story: Slave ethanol?
3 Comments | Post a Comment
The trend is towards mechanisation

The problem with this is that the trend is towards mechanisation and higher efficiency, which could lead to a social bloodbath with hundreds of thousands of cane cutters losing their jobs.
The number of problematic sugarcane plantations has become very, very low, as the Brazilian government has done a lot to improve conditions and punish those who do not live up to the rules.

Of course, Amnesty is an organisation that has a static and eurocentric view of the world, and just like all eurocentric and neocolonial organisations, wants to have something to say about biofuels in developing countries. No problem with this.

The real problem, however, is the very rapid trend towards mechanisation in Brazil's cane sector.

More than 30% of all plantations are now mechanised, and this rate is growing very rapidly.

So much so that the governor of São Paulo has recently convened a task force to find ways to prevent a social massacre resulting from the hundreds of thousands who are losing their jobs and who end up in even deeper poverty in the slums.

The proposed solution is to expand sugarcane plantations and train the jobless, unskilled workers so that they can become part of a larger mechanised sugarcane organisation.

Of course, in an ideal world we would all want that the poor landless farmers who are caught up in this dirty dilemma (either work on a plantation or end up in poverty in the slums), had access to land, good farm inputs and markets, so that they can make a living.

Sadly, there are so many barriers to this dream, that you can just as well think of the sugarcane sector as the least worst of the alternatives.

No sugarcane firm forces the poor into labor. It's the perverse economic conditions that are responsible. And if we want to change this situation, we have to tackle these root causes.

But eurocentric organisations who criticize with one hand, are not willing to use their other hand to question these root causes (because they all point at them.)

Anyways, the social sustainability of sugarcane ethanol is strong. But there's obvious room for improvement.

Just like the social benefits of Indonesia or Malaysia's palm oil industry are gigantic. But there are always some rotten palm kernels in the basket.

The structural trend towards mechanisation of sugarcane operations is far more problematic in Brazil.



by Jonas at 1:18 PM on 31 May 2008



a dangerous industry

Last year, Bloomberg reported that the rate of injury among Brazilian cane cutters was about eight times higher than that of workers in Brazil's citrus and grain industries. Exhaustion and back injuries are common -- and pulmonary fibrosis is apparently on the rise among these workers, too. An increased workload (the tons of cane workers are expected to cut each day has doubled from 30 years ago) is probably to blame.


by Liz Borkowski at 7:33 AM on 02 Jun 2008



Slavery and early death

Justifiable for the dream of fuel farming? Gas guzzling must continue at all costs, as we see in Iraq and very soon in Iran?
The message to the developing world is; surrender your lives and resources to fuel our gas guzzler lifestyle and/or face invasion, corporate and/or military. No choice.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

[Tuff Gong]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
Brazil 'slavery' damned by report

By Steve Kingstone
BBC correspondent in Sao Paulo</div></div>
Too bad they missed plus-ing it with a series on Modern Day Slavery in Jamaica, as in Culloden, Westmoreland in the former PM Constituency where girls were sold on Wednesdays for the Flesh Pot Trade or Downtown Kingston where the Dons provided security and labour for the Nuevo-Asian Businesses. Or worse the conditions under which Sugar Workers live and work...I am not even going to mention the other Former PM's Area where people used scandal bags to deposit their solid waste then sling it over the Chinese Cemetery.

Anyway I was trying to find the name <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Infinity</span> in this article and its connection to the <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Modern Day Slave Trade of Brazil</span>?

[Dr.Dudd]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Tuff Gong</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">
Brazil 'slavery' damned by report

By Steve Kingstone
BBC correspondent in Sao Paulo</div></div>
Too bad they missed plus-ing it with a series on Modern Day Slavery in Jamaica, as in Culloden, Westmoreland in the former PM Constituency where girls were sold on Wednesdays for the Flesh Pot Trade or Downtown Kingston where the Dons provided security and labour for the Nuevo-Asian Businesses. Or worse the conditions under which Sugar Workers live and work...I am not even going to mention the other Former PM's Area where people used scandal bags to deposit their solid waste then sling it over the Chinese Cemetery.

Anyway I was trying to find the name <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Infinity</span> in this article and its connection to the <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Modern Day Slave Trade of Brazil</span>?
</div></div> Infinity is a name given to an organizarion that is owned by the slave owners. Orginazations per se, does not do good or evil. It is those who run the organizations that does it.

[Tuff Gong]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Infinity is a name given to an organizarion that is owned by the slave owners. Orginazations per se, does not do good or evil. It is those who run the organizations that does it. </div></div>

I see...it is as clear as <span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">mud</span>!

[SmoothOperator]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Dr.Dudd</div><div class="ubbcode-body">It shows that slavery still is profitable even today.
Wel at least rhey won't own the lands. </div></div>

They could do worse than selling it to a Brazilian company. It could have been a North American company or a company based in Europe. Brazil and Jamaica share a somewhat similar history. I'm actually pleased that if they're going to give it away, if that is what happened here, then at least it is not being given away to one of our former colonial masters.

[Sinco01]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com



The name of this company has mi thinking - Ethanol ..
and its use in Brazil ..
not to mention what do they make ethanol from ..

yep ..

[Wahalla]

Re: Gov’t officially signs over sugar factories to Brazilian com

interesrtingly brazil has said they will go fully mechanical in three years... what will happen when they try to apply the same to ja????

[evanovitch]

hey TG, u no read weh di Supe seh dat clubs fi mek sure

seh dem go go dancers no unda age...it wud seem dat him ongle realise seh all dis a gwane since di 16 yr ole stab di odda one so kill har eena di club whe day...ah sah...an u done know seh nuff a dem cops siddung eena dem club an look pon dem young ting but now dem JUSS a realise seh dem DAT young

[Tuff Gong]

Re: hey TG, u no read weh di Supe seh dat clubs fi mek sure

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: evanovitch</div><div class="ubbcode-body">seh dem go go dancers no unda age...it wud seem dat him ongle realise seh all dis a gwane since di 16 yr ole stab di odda one so kill har eena di club whe day...ah sah...an u done know seh nuff a dem cops siddung eena dem club an look pon dem young ting but now dem JUSS a realise seh dem DAT young </div></div>

Can somebody say serendipity?
Speak of the devil:

<span style="font-family: 'Arial Black'">Teen prostitutes - Negril - trafficking hotbed, girls in poverty abducted</span>
<span style="font-style: italic">published: Sunday | June 29, 2008

Avia Collinder, Sunday Gleaner Writer </span>

A REPORT on human trafficking in Jamaica, commissioned by the National Task Force against Trafficking in Persons within the Ministry of National Security, reveals a connection between sexual exploitation, forced labour and tourism.

Completed late last year, the report: 'Human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labour in Jamaica', was prepared by Sybil Ricketts and Dr Leith Dunn of Kingston-based Searchcon Resource Consultants. The study was conducted in Kingston and St Andrew, Negril in Westmoreland and Montego Bay, St James. The findings indicate that the tourist industry, more specifically, the informal sex industry, is a significant contributor to the exploitation of individuals.

http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20080629/lead/lead2.html