Affordable Agriculture

The Wuhan virus has somewhat been a blessing for growers/planters because It taught Mauritians how important food security is, how important growing our own food is and how indispensable planters are to our population.  Lately, I have been shocked by the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables at supermarkets and shocked by some of the prices. The Wuhan virus has also shown us how useless vegetable re-sellers are in the supply chain.  Re-sellers buy from planters and sell on to consumers, supermarkets or other outlets and in the process, they make huge profit margins without taking the risks that planters take.  This practice is what made the price of vegetables go through the roof since Mauritius has been in confinement.

The lack of vegetables is primarily due to the unwillingness of some supermarkets to deal with individual planters.  As a planter, I deal with supermarkets and the ones I deal with are very open to dealing directly with planters.  On the other hand, a supermarket group that I approached sometime last year made it clear that it would rather deal with a re-seller than directly with a planter.  I had to force the purchasing manager to agree to a meeting with me to start with.  That attitude begs the question; is the re-seller giving the purchasing manager a backhander to make sure that the re-seller is that supermarket’s preferred supplier even if it means that the consumer ends up paying more? The Wuhan virus has taught us the importance of making sure that vegetable prices are kept at an affordable level for the consumers and re-sellers clearly are responsible for the high prices of vegetables that we’ve seen at some supermarkets since the lockdown started.

As no laws can be enacted to force supermarkets to deal directly with planters, supermarket owners have a responsibility and a monetary incentive to deal directly with planters.  Supermarkets must act to remove re-sellers from its supply chain and deal directly with planters.  More and more planters now have vehicles so that vegetables can be delivered to supermarkets and more and more supermarkets have the staff and infrastructure to process the vegetables to pack the vegetable if needed.  I personally, I am against the packaging of vegetables as it uses environmentally unfriendly plastics.

The lesson we need to learn from what we all have been through over the past 5/6 weeks is that planters are not responsible for the exorbitant vegetable prices we have seen lately; it is the re-sellers that have been taking advantage of a very vulnerable and serious situation. 

The average Mauritian has already been struggling financially by this imposed confinement and on top of that suffering, you have vegetable re-sellers adding oil to the fire. Mauritians should no longer put up with this and some supermarket owners must step up and act accordingly and refuse to work with re-sellers and encourage planters to work directly with them. I take my hat off to the supermarket owners that work directly with growers/planters like I as that is the way forward.  Re-sellers bring NO value to our supply chain.  The only value re-sellers bring to the grower/supermarket supply chain is more profit for the re-sellers and exorbitant prices for the consumers.

As we are all glued to social media at the moment, I could not help but notice discussions about abandoned agricultural land in Mauritius.  What baffles me personally is the insistence of some in the association of small planters to push the ‘sugar cane agenda’.  I think realistically, sugar cane is a dead crop to the small planter. The ‘white boys’, descendants of our colonial masters who were given swathes of land in Mauritius in the days that our land belonged to the kings and queens of Europe have cornered the sugar cane business.  They are the only sugar cane growers that grow on enough land and are able to process the sugar cane inhouse making sugar cane profitable for them.  Small sugar cane planters just cannot compete and that is the reality of the situation.  Small sugar cane planters should stop growing sugar cane and move to growing vegetables.

I was lucky enough to attend a small planters association meeting last year at the Octave Wiehe hall at Réduit and I was shocked how the meeting was simply a political gathering to encourage small planters to vote for a particular political party.  In my opinion, the food security of our people is not a political game.  I was shocked at the empty and unrealistic promises that the politicians were making just to get small planters’ votes.

We have to face the reality of the sugar cane business: there are countries like India and Brazil that produce sugar at much lower prices and they happen to be the biggest exporters of sugar to Europe.  How can we compete with such countries?  How can the government of Mauritius pay small sugar cane planters more per ton than what we can export the commodity for?  As an ex investment banker, this does not make any sense to me.

The ‘white boys’ take their sugar cane and transform some into refined and raw sugar for export.  But they also make rum, ethanol, bio fuel (bagasse).  So, their income from sugar cane comes from multiple streams.  But the small sugar cane planter can only grow, harvest and sell the raw material.  It is ludicrous a concept for small planters to feel that they are owed more for their raw materials than what it is worth.

If Mauritius is not ready for the industrial hemp industry due to their wrong and frankly backward perception about industrial hemp; the least small planters should be encouraged to do is convert their sugar cane plantations into vegetable plantations and with the help of the government, find the suitable employees to work the land.

It is unacceptable that when countries like the USA, the UK, France, Canada (biggest producer in the world) and China (second biggest producer) are all going full steam ahead into the cultivation of industrial hemp by changing their pre-historic laws, Mauritius cannot see the benefit that this will bring.  When will that backward herd mentality change?

It is no secret that I am part of a political party called: 100% Citoyens.  In the last general elections one of my political party’s ideas to get our economy back on track is to start the cultivation of industrial hemp.  That is the ONLY way we can create the jobs that our country desperately needs.  The ONLY way to support a dying textile industry that is finding it so hard to compete with the likes of China and Bangladesh.  The ONLY way to stop relying on the tourist industry to bring us much needed foreign currencies.

I will be writing a lot more about these topics in the subsequent issues of our magazine. Thank you for reading our very first issue and I look forward to some interactions with you; our readers.