Author: Samuel Filson Major: International Business, Spanish
Over the course of the previous eight weeks, I completed my first professional internship and it was an experience unlike any other. Along with three other students of various majors at the University of Arkansas, I spent the majority of my summer in Mbabane, the capital city of eSwatini. Formerly known as Swaziland, the kingdom of eSwatini is a small landlocked country in southern Africa bordered by South Africa and Mozambique. It is one of the largest producers of sugar in the African continent and ranks among the top 30 producers in the world. As such, their primary export is sugarcane and sugar products and these products have a large impact on the national economy.
I worked as an intern for the eSwatini Cane Growers Association, the leading representative body for sugarcane growers that provides support and information and advocates for the sustainability of cane farmers in the country. With a broader focus on economic development, the main objective of my work was to focus on the payment system for the growers. For decades when growers would bring their sugarcane to the millers to get it processed into sugar, they would be paid based on the weight of the overall cane from a set price per ton. As certain countries grew more efficient in their growing and milling processes, the focal point of their payment systems shifted from total weight to the amount of sucrose contained within the cane because sucrose is the part of the cane used to make sugar.
Most recently, some countries have further investigated more sophisticated approaches to adjust for natural differences in the average levels of sucrose throughout the season. When the weather is warmer and the sun is out for longer, the sugarcane plant spends much of its energy producing biomass in the form of extra leaves or stalk height instead of sucrose. As the weather reaches cooler temperatures during the winter months, most of its energy is focused on chemical reactions that create sucrose within the stalks. For this reason, growers want to bring their crop to the mills to get processed during times of the year when the weather is cooler and higher sucrose levels and higher profits are realized. In most locations, mills don’t have the capacity to handle that type of workload in such a short period. Therefore, growers that are scheduled to bring their cane to the mills during the warmer months of the season are at a natural disadvantage as others are additionally compensated solely based on the time of year they were scheduled to bring their crop to the mill, all other things being equal.
In eSwatini, the Cane Growers Association is curious what its growers would be earning for their cane if an approach called the Relative Sucrose formula was implemented to account and adjust for seasonal variations in sucrose and ideally create an equitable form of payment. My job was to research the relative sucrose formula, apply real data from farmers/cane produced in eSwatini to the formula to find values for their hypothetical earnings, create a distribution and organize statistics, and finally make conclusions on the effect of a hypothetical implementation of the formula. There were additional facets to this project that included learning a significant amount on the “chemistry” of sugarcane and its path from plant to sugar via meetings with other segments of the association. When help was needed, I looked over company end-of-year reports and added input on corrections and other adjustments. Overall, the research portion of the project took the most amount of time, but for not knowing anything about sugarcane before this summer, I’d say I learned a lot.
As with any major research project, the goals and research questions set at the beginning aren’t always those that are sought after or accomplished in the end. This held true in my first true research experience due to unforeseen difficulties in finding and accessing information and not having a more focused research question/goal. Originally, my job was to research how cane farmers were paid in different countries for the cane they brought in and, after applying real data from growers in eSwatini over the previous season to the different formulas, compare what the local growers in eSwatini would have made under each country’s formula to what they actually made. I immediately ran into issues searching for payment formulas; most of them are very specific, complicated, and, since they have to do with how people are paid, not public. For the formulas I did manage to obtain, numerous types of data were needed that had not been recorded by the eSwatini millers. After discussing with my boss, I decided to look at a more-or-less universal formula that some countries were utilizing: the Relative Sucrose formula. This became a blessing for my thesis and taught me one of the biggest lessons I learned about the research process; it gave me the chance to fully concentrate on a narrowed-down topic and work with it more exclusively and effectively. Your research doesn’t have to solve all the problems associated with a specific topic. We each add a little and in turn move research forward one or two steps to the next person.
Although my internship is over, and I am back home in the United States, there is still a significant amount of work to be done. The research I performed this summer has laid the groundwork for my honors thesis and will facilitate its completion upon graduation. Further, I plan on doing more background research to add to my literature review. The most significant thing about my work was that it had an impact on somebody; the ECGA has been wanting these comparisons between other payment options done for a while. It has made the research all the more worthwhile and opened up a previously undiscovered interest of mine in working with underdeveloped economies and communities. I hope to investigate this topic more in my future studies and potentially in my future career.