The Melville Sugar Mill in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province is a sign of what used to be and what the future might hold.
Trees have grown through the two brick chimneys of the mill, which closed in 1978. The sugar-cane trucks now wend their way past it on a gravel road as schoolchildren snatch up the falling stalks to suck out the sweet juice. Consolidation and struggling businesses have seen a wave of mills close.
“When I see this place it always breaks my heart,” said 56-year-old Kiki Mzoneli, a fifth-generation sugar farmer who’s watched as sugar prices fall and kept planting for fear of ceding unproductive fields back to the Zulu royal household, which owns much of the land in the southeastern province. “We plant even when we make a loss. If we don’t plant on the land, we lose it.”
Mzoneli is one of more than a million South Africans dependent on sugar. It’s a more than century-old industry that’s now struggling to compete with imports from global giants like Brazil, low labour costs in neighbouring Eswatini and to cope with her country’s bungled industrial policy that’s failed to create local demand after two decades of indecision.
Those pressures are now coming to a head. Tongaat Hulett, which accounts for more than 40% of South Africa’s refined sugar production and was founded 134 years ago, narrowly avoided liquidation after winning a state-led lifeline in June that will keep it funded until the end of this month. Its rival, Associated British Foods-owned Illovo Sugar, is struggling to turn a profit at its South African operations.
