As Sugar Fades, Hawaii Seeks a New Cash Crop

Herbert Cambra's grandfather hacked the wrist-thick tentacles of cane with a machete for 50 cents a day. Mr. Cambra's father handled the machines that crushed the giant grass and boiled its juice. Mr. Cambra himself drives the monstrous trucks that move the tangled stalks to the mill.

Here on this moss-green island of Kauai, where the first successful Hawaiian sugar plantation started in 1835, he has spent his adult life working the cane. Now, with the McBryde Sugar Company closing down its sugar operations here, he is thinking about looking for a job as a hotel security guard.

''Sugar was a tradition where it would go down through fathers to sons in our family, and now it's ending,'' said Mr. Cambra, 62. ''By September it should be all pao,'' the Hawaiian word for finished, done, over.

Mr. Cambra's family story reflects the decline and near-death of the premier crop that more than pineapples, more than tourism, more than the military made Hawaii what it is today, historians say. For decades, before foreign competition crippled it, the crop was known as King Sugar, the commodity that powered the politics, the wealth and the very peopling of what became the 50th state.

The sugar economy created the plantation system of Hawaii and imported Asian and other laborers just as cotton brought African slaves to the American South. It built Hawaii's railroads and ports. Its barons controlled these islands for more than a century with a grip so tight that by World War II, land in Hawaii was concentrated in fewer hands than anywhere else in the country. That legacy continues today, though the great fortunes and land holdings sugar created have metamorphosed into mammoth endowments and real-estate trusts.

''The land ownership continues even though the sugar declines,'' said Haunani-Kay Trask, director of the University of Hawaii's Center for Hawaiian Studies. ''So instead of growing sugar, now they grow hotels.''

As sugar has declined, tourism has taken its place -- and far surpassed it. Like many other societies, Hawaii has undergone a profound transformation from an agrarian to a service economy, becoming a vast tourism mill where 6.6 million visitors spent $11 billion last year.

The sugar industry itself, walloped by foreign competitors and squeezed by low prices that refuse to budge, has so withered over the decades that a recent Bank of Hawaii report predicted it could disappear altogether ''in the not so distant future.''

At the industry's peak in 1931, Hawaii's sugar plantations employed more than 50,000 workers and produced more than 1 million tons of sugar a year, the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center says. That plummeted to 492,000 tons in 1995, and will drop even faster when the Dole and McBryde concerns close after this growing season. Their closing will bring the number of plantations, once in the dozens, to a mere five.

This summer alone, the last sugar plantation on Oahu, a Dole-owned farm called the Waialua Sugar Company, is bringing in its final harvest, and the same is happening at the McBryde plantation here where Mr. Cambra works here on Kauai. The last sugar plantation on the Big Island of Hawaii stopped harvesting sugar last year. The decline has reached the point that the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association, founded in 1892, recently changed its name to the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, reflecting the search for other crops to grow on former sugar land.

At Dole's Waialua Sugar, that search is already intensively under way. Jerry D. Vriesenga, president of the Dole Food Company Hawaii and overseer of the sugar phaseout, is experimenting with forage grasses for cattle, papayas, coffee and Bird of Paradise. Others are testing tea, patchouli, spices and tree farming, because the warm, damp climate makes trees grow faster than just about anywhere else.

''It's all economics,'' Mr. Vriesenga said of the end of sugar. ''The sugar price hasn't risen since 1981 and labor costs have gone way up. The production cost far exceeded what you could earn.''

On its nearly 13,000 acres, Waialua Sugar produced 75,000 tons a year at its peak, and yields 60,000 now. But it has lost about $8 million a year, Mr. Vriesenga said.

Politics surely contributed to sugar's end as well. Sugar has long been used as a tool in United States foreign policy. Instead of giving foreign aid, Washington has offered sugar quotas, allowing a country to export a quantity of sugar to the United States, where it can be sold at a profit. Such deals -- and the sugar surplus they bolstered -- hurt domestic producers like those in Hawaii.

But Mr. Vriesenga and others also acknowledge that their sugar production simply fell victim to the world division of labor. They could not compete with places like the Philippines and Indonesia, where labor is cheaper. So managers like Mr. Vriesenga are selling machinery to foreign sugar enterprises and casting a creative eye around their plantations to find ways to re-employ hundreds of workers and re-use their resources.

Being rich in land and water, they still face a challenge of finding crops lucrative enough to bear the high cost of shipping to the mainland and still remain competitive. The sugar-growers have had few problems with power, because their mills burned bagasse, crushed cane fiber left after the juice has been removed, and can now burn grasses or wood chips to generate electricity and even produce a surplus to sell. ''If they wait long enough, all the workers will be be employed again,'' Mr. Vriesenga said.

But for now, the mood at places like McBryde and Waialua is more one of finality than of transition. In the control room of the Waialua mill, packed with the dials and lights of the heavy machinery, stands a blackboard with this message from some workers: ''A-planting we won't go. 96 years. Moral: do your complaining now.''

''It's really tough,'' said Yoshiaki Tanabi, the mill's production manager. ''There are people who've been working with me for a lifetime. Sugar -- that's where my career was. But you can't stop there, you have to keep going.''

For mill workers thinking about restaurant work and field hands seeking construction jobs, there is a pervasive feeling of slipping slowly into the history books. Already, there is an educational sugar plantation village on Oahu and a preserved homestead on Kauai, where the way of life that bridged the old, precolonial Hawaii and the modern, tourism-dominated Hawaii is preserved.

Mr. Cambra, whose uncles, nephews and grandfathers worked in sugar, recalled his elders' tales of working 12 hours a day, loading the cane onto cane cars pulled by locomotives, and living in sugar camps provided by the company.

''It was hot, dusty work,'' Mr. Cambra said of his own early days hoeing, weeding and fumigating. ''Cane was everything.''

In all, as many as 385,000 contract workers, little better off than slaves, immigrated here to that kind of life. The first were Chinese who arrived in 1852, followed by Japanese, Portuguese, Polynesians, Filipinos, Russians and others, whose descendants now dominate the state's population. Plantations ran under strict rules, including set bedtimes and fines for lateness, and Chinese laborers earned as little as $5 a month in the mid-19th century.

The early plantation owners who employed and housed the multinational workers were mainly settlers of New England origin, including some from families of the missionaries who arrived in the early 19th century. Their hold on the islands was so strong that according to ''Land and Power in Hawaii'' (University of Hawaii Press, 1990) in the era before World War II, nearly half the land was held by fewer than 80 private owners.

That power stemmed originally from a crop so profitable that in 1866, when Mark Twain visited Hawaii -- then known as the Sandwich Islands -- he exulted at finding ''a land which produces 6, 8, 10, 12, yea, even 13,000 pounds of sugar to the acre on unmanured soil!'' Of all the wonders he had seen in the islands, he wrote, this one ''in its importance to America, surpasses them all.''