The St Kitts Scenic Railway circles the island’s cloud-covered peak, Mount Liamuiga, carrying hordes of tourists, its schedules revolving around the near-daily influx of giant cruise ships. The railway used to transport the island’s lucrative sugar-cane crop but the Government of the twin island state finally abandoned its 350-year-old sugar industry in 2005, after years of subsidizing it due to low world market prices, high production costs and the European Union’s restructuring of sugar import quotas.
The decision policy by the St Kitts and Nevis Labour Government has had wide-ranging repercussions. Sugar production here began when British and French planters shipped in thousands of Africans as slaves in the years after 1640, and continued beyond independence (from Britain) in 1983. Families whose history and working culture had revolved around sugar for so long have had to face demands for them to ‘modernize’ and adjust to the islands’ new growth industry: mass tourism. Taxi drivers and other locals will gladly impart stories from the cane fields – and of the new trial of long hours in low-paid service jobs – to any foreigner prepared to probe a little deeper. Former sugar workers are still awaiting their share of the expected EC$16 million (US$6 million) severance payments to become reality – a dubious prospect with national debt service outweighing expenditure on health and education.
