Double trouble: Increasing tea & sugar deficits

Both tea and sugar have long become a part and parcel of our culture: they are intrinsic to our daily consumption, and their cultivation internationalised our commerce under British rule that helped the colony become the crown jewel of the British Empire. Since independence, we have increasingly produced far more consumers than all the tea or sugar harvested, generating a growing deficit. Started by the East India Company, tea production began along the Karnaphuli River from 1843, eventually shifting fulcrum to Sylhet 14 years later; while sugar was multinationalized and combined with tea by England in the 17th Century.

As one of the first South Asian commodities to involve multinational corporations, then continue to be managed by them after the British left in 1947 and Pakistan broke in 1971, tea fetched crucial foreign exchange (sometimes second only to jute): even as jute exports slipped and disappeared, tea continued to be exported until 2011, with 1982 being the peak export-volume year (34 million kilograms), but in diminishing quantities thereafter. Curiously, in 2011, Bangladesh cultivated one-third more land for tea (56,846 hectares; 1 hectare=2.47 acre) than at the time of its independence (42,928 hectares), making the 2010 output the second highest ever (50.04 million kilograms) after the 60.14 million in 2005. If this was promising, so too is our projected output target of 70 million kilograms by our 50th independence anniversary. Ultimately and inevitably, though, the expanding per capita consumption has multiplied from below 100 grams four decades ago to almost 400 grams today (and expecting to cross the 400-mark by 2021), leaving us no choice but to continue producing and importing instead of diversifying.

Tea is as native a product as any, more popular than coffee, and with over 300,000 employees, almost all women (many originally relocated from Central India owing to their meticulous hand-picking skills): it carries a more legitimate claim to emancipating women for the workforce than the RMG industry simply because it has been in the women-mobilisation business far longer. Tea-pickers have made Bangladesh the 10th largest tea producing country and the 14th largest consumer. Yet, the country boasts one of the most inefficient production rates in the world, as Dr. Kazi Muzafar Ahamed's 2012 investigation pointed out: though the yield has increased from 798 kilograms/hectare at the time of independence to over 1,200 kilograms/hectare today (as compared to 539 kilograms/hectare in 1947), the many more tea-estates dividing the total tally (172 presently, as compared to 158 in 1970 and 103 in 1947), reduces the efficiencies of scale-economy. Considering that these estates cultivate only one-third of the land they own clearly speaks to the problem. For example, annual investment growth-rate in the industry has been too low (3.64 per cent) from as far back as 1979, thus circumscribing production growth-rate to only 7.94 per cent annually since then, a time when internal consumption expanded by over 14 per cent annually.

Perhaps the most telling weakness remains the actual or suspected exploitation of the women workers. In spite of conspicuous (though scattered) evidences of worker reforms in the estates, there is not a single avenue of life-time betterment from one of the lowest jobs in the country: tea-plucking skills cannot be utilised elsewhere, making the opportunity costs of replacement (finding an equally or better-paid job in another industry) too high, unlike in other sectors where women have sought jobs. Very much like RMG workers, they are overworked, underpaid, and serve oftentimes cut-throat  patrons; but unlike the RMG workers, they do not work for an exporting industry anymore, let alone at the commanding height of the country's exports, added to which, curiously, they do not even benefit directly from the items they produce: RMG workers, even in their poverty, can flash different clothes with better styles  that they sewed in their assembly-lines than they could have done without  job; but tea-pluckers, landlocked as they are to one job, cannot rise more than a cut above slum-dwellers or house servants. As the country gradually reduces poverty incidences and level as a step towards building a developed country, tea-pluckers will increasingly stand out as the group most alienated.

That particular predicament is also the sugar industry's. Carrying the unenviable reputation of being one of the dominant industries to have matured under slave labour (for example, Europeans taking Africans to the Americas), the sugar industry left a ghost that still haunts former slaves: even as democracy was being cultivated, for example, in the newly-created United States during the 1770s, former slaves could not participate in this process until the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Fortunately for us, sugar never depicted the most despicable of its characteristics and connotations in Bangladesh, but growing sugar-cane is no social-climbing outlet: it has its own ways of demeaning the workers.

From James Walvin's chapter in White and Deadly, we learn that, since Chinese tea did not use sugar, it was Great Britain, during the 18th Century, that "transformed consumption by adding sugar," more precisely cane-sugar, a product commercialised by the British "on American lands . . . to satisfy a taste for sweetness in Northern Europe." Slavery was a consequence. "If any single crop devoured the imported Africans," he continued, "it was sugar."

Sugar-cane grows best in the tropics (whereas sugar-beet hugs the temperate climes), followed by the British flag into India, and particularly to the deltaic Bangladesh. Though, slavery did not have any Bangladeshi reverberations, "gur", a "poor-man's version of sugar," is more popular. Of the 18 state-owned sugar mills, all but three were established before Bangladesh independence (four in fact before Pakistan was created). Only the Rajshahi Sugar Mill can churn out a maximum of 2,000 tons/day; none of the others can manage more than 1,500 tons/day.

Production has almost tripled since independence (1,139,785 tons in 1971-2; 3,497,920 tons in 2008-9), in part, because cultivated land increased by 50 per cent (from 55,109 hectares to 78,740). Though the yield more than doubled from 20.68 ton/hectare to 44.52 tons during that time, Bangladesh has one of the world's lowest recovery rate (extracting sugar from the cane): according to Osman Gani's 2012 publication, Challenges in Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility in Bangladesh: this was 5.92 per cent in 1971-2 and 6.75 per cent in 2008-9, with the highest-ever achieved being 8.77 per cent in 1988-9, but clearly far below the 11 per cent in India or 14 per cent in Brazil. He also counted 20 deficit seasons, out of 34, for state-owned corporations, brought about by both small holding and obsolete machines.

One reason why may be state management. Although private sector refiners account for 80 per cent of the country's sugar marketed, the 10-5 per cent share of the government-run Bangladesh Sugar and Food Industries Corporation (BSFIC) is large enough to make a difference: the private sector relies on imported sugar, BSFIC mills on domestic; and not just that, since local producers find the "gur" market more attractive than BSFIC mills, if they have not already ditched cane-sugar, or turned to cultivating the far more profitable vegetables. As Bangladesh climbs the global income-ladder, imported sugar may displace "gur."

Clearly, we have a long way to go just to make the sugar industry functional (stand on its two feet), and tea production to recapture even a slice of its prodigious past performances. Consumption increases as a constraint, but divesting from tea or sugar would be far more costly. Bailing both out might work if other industries like apparel can buoy the degree of growth we need to meet our targets.

Before turning to the RMG success story, it may be fruitful to assess the capacities of some of the other industries to do so. The next piece plucks fishing out of the evaluation stream.

Dr Imtiaz A Hussain is Professor, International Relations, formerly Universidad Iberoamericana,

Mexico City.

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