Mauritius, Tuesday

With two clean sweeps of his blade, Zopaul Sabanand slices the sugar cane from its root, slashes off the green ears and dumps it on the pile.

His back still arched, he takes two steps in and clears away the dead leaves with his feet.

Then he starts on the next one.

"It’s not a bad job," he says, as he hacks into the cane, the sweat from his brow glistening in the sun. "It’s hard work. We start at 2 am in the morning, finish when it’s all cut. But at least the money is okay."

For almost as long as it has been inhabited, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius has produced sugar for European markets. Grown first by African slaves, and later by indentured workers from India, sugar has been the backbone of the economy.

But deep cuts in European Union subsidies over the next few years threaten to ruin the sugar plantations in one of Africa’s top producers, and could endanger the relative prosperity of the island’s 1.2 million people.

Over the next three years, EU sugar subsidies, on which many African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have depended for decades, are to be slashed by around 40 per cent to comply with a World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruling.

"People are really scared," said Sabanand. "I know lots of people who lost their jobs. Wages will come down, unemployment is going up. It’s a bad time."

Already, bad weather has forced Mauritius to cut its sugar forecast for 2005 to 550,000 tonnes from an original estimate of 575,000 tonnes. It expects to export 491,030 tonnes to the European market.

Charities such as UK-based Oxfam have long campaigned to end subsidies doled out to agro-industry by Europe and the United States.

EU subsidies are often criticised for distorting trade and harming growers in developing countries.

The WTO ruled in April that the EU was dumping its sugar surplus on world markets at subsidised prices, breaking international trade rules.