Hawaiians swapping big sugar for green sugar

[nitpicker]

http://www.dw.com/en/hawaiians-swapping-big-sugar-for-green-sugar/a-38459319
Hawaiians swapping big sugar for green sugar

With the closing of the last industrial sugar plantation in Hawaii, sustainable agriculture activists see an opening to go back to Hawaii's roots and build a model for profitable organic farming.

Only a few years ago, Hawaii produced more than a million tons of sugar a year - or 20 percent of all sugar produced in the United States. The closure of the last sugar mill on the second-largest island Maui in December 2016 marked the end of an era of big agriculture there.
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With the slow fadeout of agriculture giants, a new generation of land stewards is coming up not only with a replacement for sugar, but also a new agricultural model for the next century. And the fight is on to implement it.


When the last sugar plantation closed, Maui Mayor Alan Arakawa expressed sympathy about workers who lost their jobs - but said the change was inevitable. "Fruit trees, taro, biomass, papayas, avocados and much more have gone through trial testing - leaving us very confident that while sugarcane is dead, agriculture will remain very much alive here," he said in a statement.
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With the weakening of "big ag" in Hawaii due largely to international competition and elimination of federal sugar subsidies, small-scale organic farmers on the island are trying to regain control. Simon Russell, vice president of the Maui chapter of the Hawaii Farm Union United, says his organization wants to convince politicians to create laws favoring local, organic farmers over A&B.

Russell, who is also a small-scale farmer growing tropical fruits and vegetables - and even sugarcane - on the north shore of Maui, says the job of natural farming is to manage soil health so plants won't need chemical fertilizers. "It's called nutrient cycling," he says. "You have to manage the vitality of soil microbes. Monoculture farming has stripped the soil of those microbes."

Russell wants to scale up his 2-acre farm to 100 acres within five years. He and other organic farmers and environmental experts are in the process of developing a "roadmap to the past," when all farms were organic. But they want to update those ancient practices to be able to turn a profit in the 21st century.
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Still, moving back to Hawaii's pre-monoculture past - and making that profitable - would require A&B to sell its land at market value, something the company has not said it will do. A&B still owns the land where the sugarcane once grew - 36,000 acres of it. Of that, 9,000 acres are earmarked for eventual development, although the company doesn't specify what kind. The remaining 27,000 acres are designated important agricultural land in the state constitution, meaning they must be kept undeveloped for the company to maintain its tax benefits and water rights.

Food security is also an issue, since Hawaii imports 90 percent of its food. But Hawaiians would need water if small-scale agriculture there is to thrive. Despite billions of gallons of water originating on public lands, less than one-tenth of Maui's water resources are under public control. The vast majority goes to agricultural irrigation. "A&B has said it would like to control that water for the next 30 years, whether or not they use it," Pell said.
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