Sucre Ethique - Trinidad and Tobago - Ramesh : Hard times for ex-sugar workers

Guardian - lundi 21 décembre 2009

Tabaquite MP Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj is claiming that nine out of every ten families in areas known as the sugar belt are facing hardships. He said this was revealed in a recent survey. Maharaj made the comment while speaking to reporters at Macaulay Hindu temple in Claxton Bay, yesterday, after distributing toys to children.

He said a study done within the sugar belt revealed that out of every ten families, nine of them were facing difficulties. Maharaj said he made a decision, after the survey, to assist former sugar workers by setting up field officers in every community. “The economic downturn is putting workers in a situation that they are becoming pauperised. Most of them depended on the sweetener investment and that has collapsed,” he said.

“We found out that there is no institution to give sustainable help. The sugar union is no more and these workers are defenseless. “That is the reason the T&T Civil Rights Association has taken a decision to set up in every constituency and area, field officers who can help sugar workers.” Areas in south and central Trinidad where sugar cane was grown were referred to as the sugar belt. Maharaj said he planned to make public today, the name of the new chief executive officer of the association who was in charge of the restructuring. He also said he planned to take action against the police who brutalised peaceful protesters as they marched outside the Red House on Friday.

Maharaj said Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s speech at the recently-concluded UN meeting on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, showed the hypocrisy of Manning. “With respect to the recently-concluded Copenhagen summit, it is unfortunate that the international community could not have signed a treaty,” he said. “After all the hard work that the international governments have done, it seems the world governments are merely postponing the impossible. “I also wish to condemn the hypocritical stance of Manning when he appears to the international community as if he cares about the environment when his domestic policy is to construct three smelters along the small radius of the population ; even when the scientific evidence shows that any smelter in La Brea or elsewhere will not only get people sick and kill them with cancer but over a period of time, the effects of the smelters will destroy the environment.”

Maharaj said on one hand, Manning was purporting to care about global warming, while at the same time he was destroying the local environment with an unhealthy spate of industrialisation.