South Africa's sugarcane belt is getting absolutely wrecked by a labor shortage after the country expelled a massive wave of undocumented foreign workers. KwaZulu-Natal's North Coast has huge stretches of unharvested cane, and growers feeding Tongaat Hulett's Maidstone Mill are scrambling hard to find replacement cutters.
Pratish Sharma, a farmer out of Esenembe near Tongaat who also sits on the SA Canegrowers board, managed to swap his eight departed workers for locals almost immediately. But his neighbors aren't nearly as lucky. One grower reportedly lost around 100 cutters and has merely backfilled about 20, leaving a gaping 80-person hole in his operation.
The mill itself is still crushing on schedule because neighboring supply regions are picking up the slack, but Sharma flagged a genuine threat of cane running dry if the labor gap persists. The work is brutally physical, grueling hours under the sun demanding serious endurance, and despite available ag-tech, manual harvesting still makes the most sense for those production zones.
Pratish Sharma, a farmer out of Esenembe near Tongaat who also sits on the SA Canegrowers board, managed to swap his eight departed workers for locals almost immediately. But his neighbors aren't nearly as lucky. One grower reportedly lost around 100 cutters and has merely backfilled about 20, leaving a gaping 80-person hole in his operation.
The mill itself is still crushing on schedule because neighboring supply regions are picking up the slack, but Sharma flagged a genuine threat of cane running dry if the labor gap persists. The work is brutally physical, grueling hours under the sun demanding serious endurance, and despite available ag-tech, manual harvesting still makes the most sense for those production zones.
