
Hawaii's Final Sugar Cargo Departs Maui Aboard 'Moku Pahu' - protomyth
https://gcaptain.com/final-sugar-cargo-departs-maui-aboard-maku-pahu/
======
greenmountin
TFA says the plantation took a $MM loss on their last sugar harvest, and
intends to "diversify". According to another article about the company [0],
this diversification is:

"""

• Energy crops: “HC&S has initiated crop trials to evaluate potential sources
of feedstock for anaerobic conversion to biogas,” stated the company’s press
release. The statement added that HC&S has entered into “preliminary, but
confidential, discussions with other bioenergy industry players to explore
additional crop-to-energy opportunities.”

• Cattle: As noted above, HC&S is “working with Maui Cattle Company to conduct
a grass-finishing pasture trial in 2016.”

• Food crops: “A&B plans to establish an agriculture park on former sugar
lands in order to provide opportunities for farmers to access these
agricultural lands and support the cultivation of food crops on Maui.” Former
company employees would get preference in leasing lots.

"""

[0] [http://mauitime.com/news/business/as-the-sun-sets-on-maui-
su...](http://mauitime.com/news/business/as-the-sun-sets-on-maui-sugar-we-ask-
what-the-closing-of-abs-plantation-means-for-us/)

~~~
komali2
I'm coming in with very little knowledge of Hawaii, but having lived in
Taiwan, beef was very expensive compared to back home in Texas because there
isn't really any cattle industry on the mountainous island - it's all
imported. Wondering if it's the same for Hawaii and thus they stand to make
quite a bit of money selling locally? Or shipping to the relatively close
Asian/Pacific Islands that also don't have cattle?

~~~
dnautics
No. Pretty much the entire big island is a cattle ranch. However beef is
expensive in Hawaii because due to state law, cattle must be sent out of state
to the abbatoir before it hits your plate. Ranching on Maui probably seeks to
take advantage of the infrastructure already available because of operations
on the big island.

~~~
greedo
This doesn't appear to be accurate. Most of the cattle is sent to the mainland
due to a lack of slaughterhouses, not due to any law restricting said
slaughterhouses.

[http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/hawaii-beef-comes-
home/](http://www.hawaiibusiness.com/hawaii-beef-comes-home/)

~~~
dnautics
That is not what I was told at parker ranch! Or possibly I misinterpreted what
they said. Thank you for the clarification. I do think that the overall result
is more or less the same, instead of being an absolute ban, it's a licensure
restriction that limits the number of cows that can be slaughtered locally.

------
jdonaldson
The range of sentiment here runs from "good riddance" to "dire economic
indicator".

I used to be of the mind that food should fit under the standard economic
principles of other markets (e.g., produce food where it's cheapest/best/most
efficient). However, after seeing what happens during natural
disasters/blights/global warming etc, I'm thinking that diversified food
production is a national hedge, and wondering if government subsidies towards
continuing local production is prudent here.

I'm reminded of a documentary on Jamaica, and the effects of forced open trade
agreements as part of IMF loan conditions :
[http://www.lifeanddebt.org/](http://www.lifeanddebt.org/)

Clearly, Hawaii is not Jamaica wrt international trade, but it does have some
of the same themes :

1\. Open trade is not really fair, since subsidies are almost always involved
for competing farms as well.

2\. The loss of large amounts of easy low paying jobs can be devastating to
local economies, which carries additional costs

3\. Once gone, agricultural industry is difficult/impossible to restart
(requiring large amounts of land, irrigation infrastructure, logistics, etc.)

~~~
smallnamespace
Strongly agree -- resilience against catastrophe is an externality that the
market general prices at $0, unless government intervenes.

Simple example: we all benefit from not getting hit by asteroids, but good
luck trying to build a profitable business based on that fact.

------
TbobbyZ
My grandfather owns a home in Maui. His opinion on the factory, even thought
it brought jobs, it caused lots of pollution and only survived for so long
because of government subsidies. If that is true, good riddance.

~~~
athenot
When visiting Maui, I was surprized how sugar cane spread like weeds in many
places around the island. I don't think it was classified as "highly invasive"
but it looked invasive.

But I didn't get a chance to ask any Hawaiians about it.

~~~
semicolon_storm
It's probably because sugar cane tends to grow in fields. In Hawaii, a field
is already pretty much ecologically ruined. On the Big Island, there are
fairly large efforts to reforest areas that were previously clear cut to
produce fields for cattle and sugar cane farming. Coincidentally, the only
place I've ever seen sugar cane spread like a weed is these clear cut areas,
it doesn't seem to be able to spread into forests or diverse ecosystems. As
such, it makes sense that it wouldn't be seen as being as invasive as
something like a christmasberry tree.

------
tricolon
This article manages to spell the ship's name three ways: "Maku Pahu", "Mako
Pahu", and "Moku Pahu". Only the last way is correct.

~~~
kaiku
It isn't even a terribly difficult Hawaiian name, either!

------
digikata
Aww, I still remember the old C&H sugar ads on TV when I was a kid. "C&H, pure
cane sugar, from Hawaii..."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_and_Hawaiian_Sugar_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_and_Hawaiian_Sugar_Company)

~~~
mark-r
Wheee!

Dang you, now I've got an earworm.

------
rednerrus
C&H has been violating the Clean Air Act since it was written. Thank god
they're finally finished releasing tons of toxic chemicals into the air.

------
sxcurry
BTW, the gcaptain website is an ongoing source of interesting ship related
news.

~~~
komali2
For some reason that just strikes me as hilariously hacker-newsish. Every time
I come here there's a thread full of niche experts fervently discussing yarn,
clay tile roofs, or boats or whatever. "Check out this site, it's got cool
boat news." Love it, love that it exists, love that people read it.

------
theparanoid
My great-grandfather managed the C&H Bay Area sugar refinery. Life comes full
circle.

------
musesum
There has been a lot of interest in Breadfruit as a slow carb crop. A friend
mentioned that demand exceeds current supply.

~~~
linksnapzz
As I understand it, breadfruit trees produce seasonally, so that when they
ripen, you've got a ton of breadfruit to deal with, and figure out how to
preserve/freeze etc. And then, for the rest of the year, you have no
breadfruit. I thought that was the barrier to its viability as a commercial
crop.

Anyway, I'm glad I got to see the fields of cane growing out of the bright red
dirt on either side of the highway from Kahului to Wailea. I even made a wrong
turn and ended up in the parking lot of that sugar plant-it was about the most
industrial thing I saw on Maui.

~~~
musesum
Hmmm, that's the first I've heard about limited season, maybe for a particular
variety? There are so many kinds. Searching "breadfruit growing season"
yields:
[https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/breadfruit.html](https://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/morton/breadfruit.html)

I forwarded the OP to my friend from Global Manna. His opinion about the
effects of cane on the Island biome were less fond.

------
manachar
From my perspective on Maui I think the fate of this factory shows a problem
for any business.

Had they modernized their equipment and methods years ago when profits were
good, they very likely could have continued to operate at a profit and with
the support of the community.

Instead, they kept the field burning, the impossibly ancient mill equipment,
and didn't adapt to the dropping price of the sugar to focus on more secondary
goods like rum, organic sugar, etc.

By the time they realized they'd either have to change or go out of business
they were too ingrained to change and didn't have the profits to invest in
changing anyways.

It's a bittersweet change for Maui. The real fear is that all of this ag land
will increasingly be converted to inefficient subdivisions as has happened on
O'ahu and is happening at Maui Lani and up in Kula.

~~~
bradleyjg
_The real fear is that all of this ag land will increasingly be converted to
inefficient subdivisions as has happened on O 'ahu and is happening at Maui
Lani and up in Kula._

Inefficient in what sense?

Edit: Thanks for the reply.

~~~
manachar
O'ahu has some of the worst traffic in the country hugely because of spread
out neighborhoods/subdivisions rather than investing in density. We don't have
enough land to build large enough highways, subdivisions, and the standard
car-based strip-malls.

I will admit, from a certain economic standpoint, ag land in Hawaii is much
less efficient than low-density housing. I do believe that the negative
externalities not included in that point of view should be considered (e.g.
environmental cost, harm to the tourist industry, the ever nebulous quality of
life, etc.).

The economic pressures to build subdivisions are huge as the cost of housing
is way out of proportion to the incomes of locals, but demand continues to
outstrip supply and with as limited of land as we have, we're just not going
to be able to ever reduce costs by trying to supply demand with subdivisions.
Unfortunately, we also tend to pass laws limiting height and density and don't
have enough mixed zoning areas.

------
zilchers
The way they harvested the sugar involved burning the fields (I believe after
harvest, but could be wrong) which lead to unusually high levels of
respiratory illnesses on Maui - I think this is net-net good, but like the
rest of the country, more areas of job growth are needed.

Interestingly, Maui has one of the lowest levels of unemployment in the
country at around 4%

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596502/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4596502/)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=hawaii+unemployment+rate](https://www.google.com/search?q=hawaii+unemployment+rate)

------
asciimo
Where's the sugar coming from now? I assume they're not closing due to reduced
demand.

~~~
dpark
I wouldn't be surprised if demand for cane sugar was down. Most foods
substituted corn syrup decades ago. And of the sugar sold, it's not all cane
sugar. Much of the sugar is sourced from beets.

~~~
mark-r
Our government has been limiting sugar imports forever, to maintain a domestic
production capacity. In the end all we ended up doing is providing the impetus
for a substitute - the production is going away anyway.

~~~
dnautics
Actually that's untrue. There's very little domestic cane sugar (beet sugar
only can be turned into white sugar). Government has been limiting sugar
imports with a tariff regime because a single family runs the Dominican
refineries and they lobby Congress to keep tariffs up everywhere but there and
thus secure a monopoly.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanjul_brothers](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanjul_brothers)

If you are a small household cook you may not know this but you should buy all
of your white sugar in the fall when the Montana beet crop comes in and drops
the price (though commodity options trading may have smoothened that out a bit
in recent years)

~~~
maxerickson
It costs less than $1 a pound in small packages. It's probably not worth
thinking about it unless you use quite a large amount of sugar.

------
rwmurrayVT
I believe the Maku Pahu will be headed to the scrap yard shortly. They had a
recent availability for perspective bidders to shipcheck. The award has yet to
be announced, and the rumour is they will cancel the project. No reason to
repair a ship headed to a scrap yard.

------
icu
What a great example of the Aloha Spirit. Although I have long left my home
state, it touches me deeply to know my fellow Hawaiians keep the Spirit alive.

------
creeble
C&H produces 6 million pounds of sugar _a day_. I wonder where they get it
from now?

~~~
Naritai
I haven't found info about this company, but many countries from South &
Central America, as well as Indonesia and the Philippines, are all major
sugarcane exporters.

~~~
knz
Australia as well.

