[originaltext] In early September, Trinidad’s state-owned sugar company made

In early September, Trinidad’s state-owned sugar company made all of its 9,200 employees redundant. Though most are Indo-Trinidadians and supporters of the island’s truculent opposition party, there were no protests. The workers got redundancy pay totaling 115 million dollars, the offer of retraining, and the chance to continue growing cane as independent farmers in plots on the company’s 31,000 hectares of farmland.
    Trinidad, booming on oil and gas, has plenty of new jobs. Jamaica’s stagnant economy is another story. The government privatized its sugar factories in 1994, but agreed to take them back four years later. Hit by floods and droughts, this year’s sugar crop was a disaster. A shutdown might be greeted with riots by the 7,000 sugar workers and 8,000 cane farmers of the country. Barbados, prosperous and stable, has a different problem. Its neat cane fields are far more attractive to tourists than the eroded scrubland of Antigua, which stopped growing sugar 30 years ago.