Sugar Needs Water! Save HC&S Jobs! Click for Larger ImagePUUNENE – They came out on their coffee breaks and at the end of their shifts, in dust-covered shirts and grease-flecked work boots and with rough hands. A circle of soot rimmed their cheeks where their respirators had been minutes before.
About 20 Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. employees held their own news conference Thursday afternoon, along with a few HC&S supervisors, to make their case to the public that 800 full-time Maui jobs with benefits are at stake if the state Water Resource Management Commission rules against them in the Na Wai Eha streams case.
At issue is HC&S’ current practice of diverting up to 70 million gallons a day from Na Wai Eha, or "the four great waters" – Iao, Waihee, Waikapu and Waiehu streams. Water Commission Hearings Officer Dr. Lawrence Miike, who also sits on the independent board, has proposed reducing that amount by half.
HC&S agronomist Mae Nakahata said that if Miike’s proposed decision stands, about 5,500 acres of sugar cane above and below Honoapiilani Highway in Central Maui would be lost forever.
"If this goes against us, it could be a show stopper," said Robert Lu’uwai, HC&S vice president of factory operations. "Our expenses keep going up, and this year was the lowest sugar production we’ve ever had because of the (three-year-old) drought."
The mill typically produces up to 200,000 pounds of sugar, but produced just 127,000 pounds this year, Lu’uwai said.
Yesterday, Gay & Robinson announced that they would cease sugar operations on Kauai this fall, a year earlier than they had previously announced. This will mark the end of sugar production on Kauai.
When Gay & Robinson first announced its intentions in July 2007, there was anticipation that a partnership with Pacific West Energy LLC would merely shift the sugar cane business from consumable sugar to the production of ethanol. Those plans never met fruition.
With the end of sugar production on Kauai, only Maui’s Alexander & Baldwin’s Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co. remains as the only producers of sugar cane in Hawaii. Poor economic conditions and drought conditions on Maui have cast a shadow on the future of sugar on Maui.
It is not beyond comprehension that within a few short years, Hawaii’s two iconic agricultural products, sugar cane and pineapple, may be no more. Currently Maui Land & Pineapple Co. Inc. is the only remaining producer of pineapple in Hawaii. Cheaper sources of pineapple elsewhere in the world and huge financial losses have cast doubt about the future of that operation as well.
Hookipa Maui Harvest Click for Larger ImagePUUNENE – Sugar prices are through the roof this year, but that will be of little help to Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., which will have its sugar output reduced by drought to an estimated 125,000 to 130,000 tons this year.
But even if HC&S had more to sell, it still wouldn’t benefit, because it sold its production on forward contracts at what now seem like low prices.
The Alexander & Baldwin subsidiary does not participate in the government loan price support program, which is irrelevant this year, since world and American prices are far higher than the 18 cents per pound support rate.
HC&S will soon complete its harvest and shut down the mill, but for much longer than the usual one or two months.
