Organization and profit-sharing in mechanized sugarcane harvesting: Is Australia's experience relevant to China?

Abstract: China now grows about 1.5 million hectares of sugarcane and is the third largest sugar producer in the world. Almost all of that cane is still harvested by hand belabor in countryside areas has become more expensive and difficult to recruit. While the sugar mills prefer to crush the cleaner cane that manual harvesting delivers, some mills in areas where mechanical harvesting capacity has increased in recent years, have imposed restrictions on the quantity of machine cut cane that can be delivered each day. In the longer term, it is inevitable that the mills will have to accept a greater proportion of machine harvested cane. It is therefore important that an institutional structure and operating rules to control the harvesting sector be developed as the transformation from manual to mechanized harvesting takes place in China to achieve the best possible outcome for the sugar industry. Australia was the pioneering country that developed mechanized sugarcane harvesting but most of the organizational arrangements for mechanical harvesting of sugarcane were adapted from the manual cutting system that preceded mechanization. The cane payment system in Australia partly acknowledges the respective capital shares involved in the independent farms supplying cane and the mills which process it, and attempts to share revenue from sugar sales roughly in proportion to their respective historical capital investments. When mechanical cane harvesting was introduced into the Australian industry, there was no attempt to recognize the capita