Chronicles of a Disturbed Mind: where sugar ain't so sweet

Thursday, August 05, 2010

where sugar ain't so sweet

sacadas are the migrant farm workers hired seasonally by plantation landlords or hacienderos to work on the vast sugar plantations of negros island. for inhuman wages, they work under such grueling conditions that many consider them modern day slaves, vestiges of the old spanish colonial system of subjugation.

they are also called tapaseros, since that is what they do in the local language, 'tig tapas ug tubo'.

many landlords and sugar planters customarily use the pakyaw system in hiring sugar workers. teams of around 8 to 15 tapaseros work on harvesting the sugarcane, and they are paid per ton of the harvest.

pictured below is my host on this trip, pastor jonathan, surveying the field of harvested sugarcane.

if my memory serves me right, these men were contracted for P80 per ton of cut sugarcane, and we estimated that 3 days of work would earn each of them at most P300, or P100 a day. here in the city, i know of a few people who earn in an hour sitting down what these men earn in 3 days of backbreaking work. but still, they are relatively lucky. from what i heard, there are some farm workers who receive as low as P60 a day.

after cutting, the tapaseros then gather the cut cane in bunches, enough for one shoulder load. they will then haul off the bunches one by one to the big trucks the landlord has hired to deliver the harvest to the sugar mill. but that's if the truck arrives.

the tapaseros are only paid once they haul all their harvested sugarcane to the truck. if the truck does not get there on time (if it's busy somewhere delivering someone else's harvest, or is under repair), then the tapaseros have no choice but to wait. without it, they don't get paid.

sacadas/tapaseros are hired mainly during the harvest and milling season. in the periods when there is no demand for their work (from june to september, called the "tiempos muertos" or "dead season"), many of them go about looking for odd jobs, or they go back home with what little they've earned.

in the instance that their meager cash runs out, they are sometimes forced to either take loans from the landlord, or buy basic goods on credit from the hacienda store, also owned by the landlord, where goods can cost as much as twice the usual prices in town. this keeps them in a cruel cycle where they have to continually work off their debts.

the thing i regret most is not asking these men their names, or more about their lives, their stories. without their names, i'm afraid that, after reading this, they'll simply fade back into that notion we have of "the way things are". or worse, that we see them as nothing more than statistics, that we forget that they too are human. we have our debts to pay, for the sweetness that we indulge ourselves in is the product of the sweat that these men have poured onto these fields.

it's lamentable that p-noy's first state of the nation address made no mention at all about agrarian reform. but even more lamentable, that only the regular farm workers and tenant farmers are prioritized in the carp extension bill (republic act 9700) that congress passed in 2009, giving the migrant sacadas a lesser priority in the scheme of things.

on this excursion to the sugarcane fields, some kids from the neighborhood had also joined us.

they started picking up some of the smaller stalks from the harvested sugarcane and stripping off the skin, then proceeded chewing. this made me a bit nervous, as the tapaseros could clearly see what the kids were doing to their harvest. but the tapaseros did not seem to mind.

watching these kids soon led me to wonder what kind of lives they'll be leading in the future. i'd heard stories of landlords hiring children to do work on the fields (weeding, fertilizing, etc.) before the planting of sugarcane. this is time spent away from school, time spent away from their supposed way out of this life of penury.

i can only hope that these children will no longer be caught in the cycles of poverty that trapped the generations before them, that our generation will finally find the resolve to put an end to all this...