‘None of us are idlers’ - With mouths to feed, cane cutter takes a swing at the future
Published:Monday | November 11, 2019 | 12:25 AMKaryl Walker/Gleaner Writer
Bare-chested with a machete in his hand, Omar Hunt took a breather as he sipped a ‘special’ – a mixed drink with the major component being rum.
He bore a look of concern as he spoke of the demise of King Sugar in the district of Duckenfield, St Thomas, which has been reeling from the economic fallout caused by the closure of the sugar-processing factory in the community.
Hunt is one of scores of sugar industry workers who have been hit hard in the pocket.
The last in a long line of ancestral cane cutters, Hunt painted a vivid and grim picture of the back-breaking work – a task that harks back to the brutality of chattel slavery to which his forebears were victim centuries ago.
“A cane me cut fi a living. Them pay we $500 a tonne when cane season come in,” he said, repeating the cost over and over.
Fraught with danger
Hunt, who said he could cut nine tonnes of cane every day, bemoaned the wear and tear of the job, which was also fraught with danger.
He said that cane-cutting season could last a month or more.
“We have to do it. Is many mouth it feed. If we get chop, we just band it up and go on cut cane same way. Me get chop sometime,” the physically fit labourer told The Gleaner.
“If you back weak, you can’t cut cane. It depends on the breed of cane, too, ‘cause some cane tough and harder to chop.”
Hunt and hundreds others will no longer be able to earn an income from cane cutting because of the closure of the Golden Grove Sugar Factory and Fred M. Jones Estates.
He has resigned himself to the faint hope that he can get access to the hundreds of acres of state-owned land that is now overgrown in sugar cane.
“We need the land to clear so we can grow food and other crops. None of us around here are idlers. My grandfather and my father used to cut cane. Now it stop with me. Things just rough right now,” he said.
Hunt, like the hundreds of direct and indirect beneficiaries of sugar, will now be forced to find creative ways to put food on his table.