Sugar

Remember when I mentioned when we were in Veracruz and almost home, we got stuck in traffic? This (picture below) was it. If we had waited here it would have been about 24 hours before we moved.  Luckily, we went up and around some unofficial roads to get to this bridge where I took this picture and got on out of there.  What was it?  A major accident? Construction? No. Sugar.

 

You see, around here, sugar rules.  Well, it does because it is the lifeblood of the area.  Besides a chicken farm and very few people that have jobs in the city, everyone relies on the sugar cane industry.  Papi's Dad is a sugar cane farmer.  People in town who don't have land either work as day laborers (especially cutting season starting now through June), or depend on their customers having money from that in order to buy from them. 

 

Veracruz is the largest producer of sugar of all the Mexican states by far.  The last harvest season, the price of sugar per ton was about half of what it was the year before.  Landowners in our town went to the sugar mill to collect their season's earnings and instead got a big fat "0" on a paper after the mill subtracted what was owed for advances for fertilizer, paying workers, etc.  They normally budget this payment to last for the whole next year, to eat, to pay power, to pay workers, everything they can. It is their whole annual income.  They were literally left with absolutely no money for at least the full coming year.  One man in town went to the top of a water tower and threatened to jump. 

 

August and September are normally "dead months."  People usually have no money and are just holding out until harvest starts again where they can earn $10 a day.  (And the fact that "things are cheaper in Mexico" is a big fat lie. Big. Fat.  It is cheaper if you are retired and have American money deposited monthly into your account like magic.)  But these last few months have been the hardest in many, many years.  All levels of the local economy are feeling the effects.  Desperate people lead to desperate measures.  On the day of the photo below, the farmers decided to block off the interstate in order to call attention from the government to their plight.  What exactly they wanted the government to do, I'm not quite sure, but from the little I understand so far they were asking for a subsidy to help offset the low price.

 

 

 

The fate of the coming season still seems up in the air.  We are just praying that it comes out well, many families are depending on it.

 

Delicious sugar straight from our mill, La Providencia.  It's lighter than brown sugar (but not at all sticky like brown sugar), but not white... and very delicious.