Labour Leader Mahendra Chaudhry visited Labasa last week meeting with farmers, businessmen and the people generally.
He paid a visit to the Labasa sugar mill where he met with scores of lorry drivers who had been waiting several hours to unload cane as a result of mill breakdown.
Lorry drivers told Mr Chaudhry that they often had to wait between 8-12 hours to unload cane.
"It has never been this bad. Farmers are losing quite a bit as cane juice is pumped into the Qawa River because of milling problems. The mill breaks down every now and then and the crushing rate is very slow," said a lorry owner who is also a cane farmer.
In fact, the joke going around is how at their pre-crush meeting with FSC, they were given grand assurances that with the mill upgrading now complete, everything will run so smoothly that lorry drivers did not need to worry about long waits to unload cane.
"It will be just 'come and go, come and go', we were told. The reality is more like 'Come today, go tomorrow," they said.
The Labasa Mill area used to produce a crop of around 1.2 million tonnes but that is now halved, with the season's crop being estimated at 650,000 tonnes.
A major cause of the sharp decline in production I the expiry of land leases. Thousands of leases have simply not been renewed driving cane farmers out of Labasa. Many have re-settled in the Suva-Nausori corridor and have pledged not to return to cane farming.
A senior civil servant told Mr Chaudhry that Labasa was emptying at the rate of around 410 families each year. They leave to resettle either on Viti Levu or in Savusavu and Taveuni.
"Young men and women who receive their higher education in Viti Levu simply do not return. "They have nothing to come back to as there is hardly any employment available here," said an elderly lady whose three grand children, having studied at USP, remained in Viti Levu.
Meanwhile, most of the land taken back from the hardworking farming families lies idle, having reverted to bush.
