OVER the past five years, as farm wages soared, sugar-cane growers in southern China looked across the border to Vietnam for help. They hired Vietnamese workers—nearly a quarter cheaper than Chinese ones—to tend their fields, especially during the winter harvest. The immigrants were illegal but local authorities looked the other way. Some 50,000 Vietnamese streamed annually into Chongzuo, China’s “sugar capital” in Guangxi province, where cane stalks sprout from red fields nestled among the karst hills. But given recent political tensions with Vietnam, China has started to turn the migrants away. For sugar-cane growers, the effect is akin to Mexican workers suddenly disappearing from Californian fruit farms.
Even without this blow, Chongzuo’s farmers should have been in deep financial trouble because of competition from cheap imports. But they were just about making ends meet, thanks to efforts by the central government to prop up the country’s sugar industry. It has slowed approvals of imported sugar and bought the more expensive local product for bulging state reserves. To encourage loss-making farmers to go on planting sugar cane,...Continue reading
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