From small towns like Durame and Shinshincho of the Kembata province to the highlands of Hadiya, the buzz that has gone viral across the villages for years looks rampageous.

Their men, who are back in the villages after eight to ten months will undoubtedly dominate society with their new exotic outfits, wrist watches, haircuts, and the items they bring home. They invigorate the calm minds which is restricted to the backyard of the vegetable farms and small-scale animal husbandry. The arrival of these young men and even fathers of extended families is the wakeup call for the villagers who would want the pack up and leave to the sugarcane plantations in Wonji and Metehara.

These extremely hard-working men on their way to one of the country’s lowland semi-desert areas will soon find out the horrible conditions of their jobs. They are flocking to a sugarcane plantation of an estimated 10,200 hectares, their strong hands and aspirations of changing their way of living, the driving force leave behind the villages in Southern Ethiopia for the Awash valley, Metehara, one of trhe the oldest and so far the largest sugar factory in the country. Until they receive a machete from their employers and the blessing of the Kapo, the landlord who deploys them in the plantation, they cannot get a job in Metahara’s sugarcane plantation, a small town 200 km west of Addis Ababa.

The establishment date of the Metahara Sugar Factory goes as far back as 1965, when the Dutch company Hangler Vondr Amsterdam (HVA) surveyed the area for future sisal development. However, the increasing demand for sugar in Ethiopia and sustainability of the land and climate for sugarcane cultivation urged the company to extend the sugar industry to the Metahara plains. As a result, in July of 1965 an agreement was signed between the imperial government of Ethiopia and the company. The factory started producing plantation white sugar four years later with an initial crushing capacity of 1700 tons of cane per day (TCD). As an autonomous public enterprise, the factory has been one of the major industries of the country. Perhaps because extensive labor is accumulated in the Southern part of the country, the Kembata, Hadiya and Wolayta peoples became the first to fill the labor gap of the huge industry.

Since then camps have been widely seized by those people from the south. “Half of the newcomers go back to their villages when the contract terminates and the rest prefer to stay to be the first when the next season kick-starts,” Feleke Jeleta, a veteran employee of the factory said. Having served for ten years in the plantation by cutting sugarcane he was promoted to factory work. “I didn’t know that was a curse as the blessing would always exist on the plantation along with harsh labor exploitation, thirst and burning from the hot-weather,” he regrets. He remembers the demise of his promotion. On a cursed day, as the forklift failed to put up a heavy load of bricks, it came tumbling down on him. “Look, parts of my bones are full of metal splinters. I’ve been suffering for a decade almost. Had I been on the plantation this wouldn’t have happened to me,” he reiterates that his destiny was to be on the plantation with all those risks.

Despite the misery that followed Feleke’s promotion from the plantation to the factory, no one would seemingly refuse any permanent position since sugarcane cutting is a temporary work. “I have been here for a couple of years, and I’m waiting to be permanent.” Teketel, a 31-year-old sugarcane farmer says. He has done this for seven years enduring the harsh features of the job. He used to constantly cut his hands on the job, he was burned by the sun and had health complications during those seven years. Nevertheless, he is determined to cope with the risks since he has already settled down in the shabby camp, which accommodates hundreds of retired sugarcane farmers. “Since I have a landlord (supervisor) who has worked with me for many years I get my job back when the canes are ready to undertake cutting,” he says. In spite of all the miseries he has suffered for those seven years he praises his job. “You will never see this face when I’m on the job. It won’t be me. I’m sooty and darkbecause of the juicy fluid that splatters on my skin,” he explains.

In fact, this is the harsh reality of the job as sugarcane is a water-intensive crop that remains in soil all year long. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), as one of the world’s thirstiest crops, sugarcane has a significant impact on health and environmentally sensitive regions. A research conducted by the WWF claims that historic planting of sugarcane around the world has led to significant impacts on biodiversity. Farmers who have had a series of illnesses like coughing, colds, and abdominal pains tabulate facts and figures from their medical expenses and expenditures, which they say is unbearable for them. Moreover, their skins have been badly damaged due to the fluid’s intensive juicy nature that rapidly absorbs sunlight. “We usually wash our skin with rough material they use to make sacks,” they reply. The heart-breaking part of the misery is yet to come, as they often remain closed to talk about it. The outrageous and greedy landlords, who hire them to cut thesugarcanes, have already made the damage to their precious labor through their unlawful agreements and inhumane acts, according to the residents and employees of the factory. Locally known as “kapo – a leftover from Italian occupation meaning capo or chief.” the coordinators in charge of the labor are feared and infamous in comparison to the managers and factory leaders. “They cheated, harassed and exploited them like slaves,” Zenebe Yimam, general manager of the factory says. More painfully, these weak, uneducated and destitute contract laborers opened a weekly social saving account with their kapos who constructed houses and commercial buildings.

The unlawfulness and extreme crackdown on the labor made the factory, one of the worst places in the world to be in, according to employees and the new managing team. And farmers of the plantation have already faced the most significant damage of failure experienced by the enterprise. “It was like an attempt to move a mountain,” the management team explains the challenges that tested the new management, which is now widely considered the cause for change for implementing Kaizen, a famous Japanese philosophy of process improvement. “We feel happy now, better, we should not be occupied with fears and anxiety,” the employees give their conceit on the new management. Despite the positive start that saw the sacking of supervisors who had full control of the plantation, the framers are now trying to calculate the salary they are paid for the day. “We used to be deaf and blind. they gave us what they felt like, but this time we are smart enough about what we do and how much we should get,”Teketel explains. However, the consistent flow of new arrivals every year will make it harder and time-consuming to uproot.

Although the sugar-cane industry appears to be one of the more dangerous employments as a farmer, where farmers and employees face so many harsh realities related to labor rights and wages in Asia and other parts of the world, farmers and employees in the Metehara sugar factory have seen quite unbearable tribulations arise from poor supervision and management. Breaking down the illegal chains amongst the supervisors and promoting the factory workers to become intrepid and loyal to their duty is the ultimate role that the new management should play for the renaissance of the historic factory, commentators claim. Furthermore, the government that has hugely been involved in the expansion of the sugar industry should make reformations in upbringing economical and transparent managing partners who can assist the production labor with effective, inspirational and flexible tools and practices.

As sugarcane was believed to be the world’s largest crop by production quantity in 2012, the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) estimates it was cultivated on about 26.0 million hectares, in more than 90 countries it would attract more labor in the coming decades. More importantly, the flow of investment in the country has to be maintained through strengthening the capacity and labor protection of such an important industry. Yet the mystery of easing the burden of the farmers who grieve daily about their misfortunes seems to be a little bit far as the factories look impertinent for those important taskforces who have greater authority on the fate of the sugarcane. A veteran sugar industry expert, Wubishet Mola, told the Reporter that proper conduct with these people may result in reduction of production, and this will finally cause a complete liquidation of the factories. “Coaching the farmers ahead of cutting and assisting them with some equipment may prevent them from possiblehealth crises and accidents, this should be done ahead of deployment,” he says.

This time around, the vast global market for sugar derivatives keeps the industry booming, and sugar is becoming prevalent in the modern diet and increasingly a source of bio-fuels and bio-plastics, but it should also slacken the deterioration of the lives of the farmers. Therefore, no more languor, tatty, and querulous farmers are seen on the fields, commentators suggest. Hence, they should be treated as others factory workers are so that inferiority complex and a harmful habit of chewing on the cane they cut can be stopped to make sure every single plant is saved to sustain increases in production and to keep them fit enough, aiming at the new factories being constructed in the country, they conclude.