Wanted — An Agricultural Revolution

From Our Archives: A Glimpse into 1960

By Peter Ibbotson

One of the great drawbacks to increased agricultural production in Mauritius is the excessive fragmentation of the land which has occurred. This has given rise to an inordinate number of small — indeed, very small; one might truthfully go further and say “too small” — land-holdings. These very small holdings are not at all economical; they are largely devoted to sugar growing and their yields are well below the yields of the larger plantations.

Workers loading sugarcane on carts. Pic – Library of Congress

There are nearly 18,000 sugar plantations whose area is less than five arpents; this is 85 per cent of all small plantations. Their yield has been slowly but steadily falling over the past few years; in 1958 their average yield was only 18.3 tons per arpent compared with 19.7 tons per arpent in 1957. But in 1958 the estates averaged nearly 29.5 tons per arpent; and this was not entirely due to the fact that the estates’ land is better than the planters’ land. It was partly due to the benefits accruing from large-scale production; for sugar is best produced on units of production over 100 arpents. Smaller plantations of 30 arpents or over are not uneconomic propositions; but under 30 arpents means that the most economic use is not being made of the land in question.

In the past in these columns, and in a memorandum to the Meade Commission, I have argued that sugar production will go on increasing — because of the adoption of improved agricultural techniques — year after year, and (unless it is limited in some way) will inevitably outstrip the capacity of the market to absorb the total production. If the future total sugar production be maximised at 650,000 tons per year, this total tonnage could well be produced by the estates, leaving the planters and metayers with land surplus to the colony’s sugar-growing requirements. Alternatively, the planters and metayers could grow sugar, leaving the estates with surplus land.

This land surplus to the acreage needed to produce the 650,000 tons of sugar could well be utilised for vegetable and other food crops. The estates are already cultivated on a large scale, so that large scale food crop production would be merely a case of applying the same techniques of production to a different crop. But the planters and metayers, if it were their land that were diverted from sugar-growing to food crop production, would still — in present circumstances — be farming their small plots on a small scale; and on an uneconomic scale, with maximum utilisation still denied to the land.

If my argument of a maximum sugar production be accepted, therefore, it becomes clear that the small planters and metayers will — whether they grow sugar or food crops — still be under-cultivating their land if they stick to their small scale agricultural techniques. The economy of Mauritius will still not be maximized, will still not be making the best use of its limited area of cultivable land. It is inevitable, therefore, that in order that the land may be utilised to its fullest extent and that the fullest possible return be derived from it, there will have to be some radical change in agricultural technique.

No-one wishes to deny the value, as much psychological as anything else, of the independence which a peasant feels when he owns and tills his own plot be it only an arpent (or even less). No one wishes to rob anyone of his personal plot of land, and to rob him of the feeling of independence which such ownership confers. What is wanted is to ensure that the independent peasant gets the maximum return from his plot; and this, in present conditions in Mauritius, he just does not do.

A new approach is obviously needed. One suggestion which I venture to put forward as a method of increasing agricultural production is this. Where possible, small planters’ individual plots should be cultivated as a whole. In a given area, the small planters combine to form a Planters’ Co-operative. Each member of the co-operative retains ownership of his individual land; but the Planters’ Co-operative controls the annual agricultural operations — ploughing, planting, reaping, manuring, selling. The Department of Agriculture is ultimately responsible for the establishment and oversight of the various Planters’ Co-operatives; the agricultural machinery necessary for the large-scale cultivation of the Co-operative’s land is either the property of the Co-operative or is hired when necessary, from the Department of Agriculture. The Agricultural Advisory Service of the Department should be available free of charge to the Co-operative, or at a nominal charge only providing that the members of the Co-operative carry out the stipulations of the Department as regards fertilizers, etc.

This type of Planters’ Co-operative resembles the type of cultivation practised in parts of the Commonwealth — c.p. the Fiji sugar industry, where the land belongs to the sugar barons but is leased to small growers whose responsibility begins only after the annual ploughing which is done under the sugar barons’ control. (In Fiji therefore there is none of the huge disparity between estates and small planters). Schemes such as this have been successful elsewhere in the Commonwealth; says Professor W. A. Lewis, “They combine the advantages of large-scale mechanisation, science and supervision, with the initiative and quasi-independence of the small man, and show superior yield per acre and per man.” Not all Planters’ Co-operatives would be exactly alike; the localised conditions of the soil and physical features would clearly demand flexibility in the exact constitutions of the cooperatives and the division of powers between the planters and the Department of Agriculture.

If the Department of Agriculture were to abandon almost all of its concern with sugar to the Sugar Industry Research Institute and the Chamber of Agriculture generally, and devote the major part of its activities to improving peasant agriculture in Mauritius (and I have briefly sketched out one of the ways in which this latter could be done), there is little doubt but that better use could be made of the limited area of cultivable land available in Mauritius. But as I have said, there will have to be a radical change in land use; and the many small planters who wring a hard living out of tilling their handful of perches of sugar would do well to reflect on the benefits which would accrue from a larger scale of cultivation, call it communal, co-operative, collective, or what you will. Only an agricultural revolution will solve the agricultural problems now facing Mauritius; and I hazard a forecast that the Meade Report will say so.

7th Year – No 326
Friday 25th November 1960

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