COLUMN ONE : Bitter End to Hawaii’s ‘Sugar Life’ : Once cane was king. But now many of the great mills will close. The empty fields will leave islanders with empty hearts and hundreds of old-timers without jobs.

The smell of molasses and a sense of gloom pervaded the cavernous Hamakua Sugar mill. The last cane to be grown on the plantation’s 32 miles of coastline fields was being chopped, crushed, boiled and dried.

“It breaks my heart because I have an emotional attachment to this place,” said plantation general manager Ernest Bouvet, 73, who redesigned the mill in 1976. “When I do something, I give it my best. I did that here. I will miss the sugar life.”

After 118 years, the Hamakua plantation is scheduled to shut down Sept. 30--the first in a wave of closures that will decimate the industry that helped build Hawaii.

Three other plantations on the islands of Hawaii and Oahu will close in 1995. A fourth is seeking drastic wage cuts from workers to survive another harvest.

Only plantations on the islands of Maui and Kauai are expected to survive the shakeout and continue producing raw sugar into the next century.

A victim of rising production costs, foreign competition and the use of corn sweeteners in soft drinks, Hawaii’s sugar industry has limped along for years on state loans, fluctuating revenues and tax breaks.

With the plantations’ demise finally at hand, Hawaiians are mourning the end of an era and fiercely debating the future of the vast sugar lands and the people who lived and worked on them for generations.

Residents and tourists will miss the rolling green plantations that some consider as much a part of life here as the ocean. True Hawaiians may also miss the grainy brown smoke and sickly sweet smell of new sugar wafting from the mills at harvest time.

Beyond nostalgia, hundreds of workers--many descended from the immigrants who first farmed the fields more than a century ago--face a greater loss: Without sugar, they will have no jobs and no idea of what to do next.

“Knowing the plantation will close puts tears in my eyes,” said retired plantation worker Santos (Pito) Begas, 72, sitting on the steps of the red wood-framed house that he has lived in for decades. His father came from Puerto Rico and was a foreman on the Hamakua plantation. “God willing, I can stay here,” Begas said. “At my age, I have no place else to go.”

As for the future of the cane fields, “the problem we now face is a reflection of what kind of state we have become,” said Kem Lowry, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii. “We have been a tourism state for quite some time. But there is a nostalgia for a different period in our history that remains quite strong.

“Everyone knew this change was coming. What took so long to prepare? Much of the plantation land is privately owned and there has been an ambivalence about the proper role of government.”

“If you want wall-to-wall city in Oahu, opening these lands up for development is fine,” said James Silva, a soil scientist at the University of Hawaii. “But if you prefer nature and open green space, it would be a terrible loss.”

In any case, the plantations on Hawaii and Oahu are expected to remain fallow for years as alternative land-use proposals are debated in state and county offices, landowner boardrooms and community gatherings, state officials said.

One worry is that the untended acreage may introduce the danger of catastrophic fires as more than 60,000 acres of carefully manicured irrigated cane fields dry up and become prairies of guinea grass, ironwood trees and weeds.

Hamakua, Hilo Coast Processing, Mauna Kea and Oahu Sugar companies are under pressure from state officials to plant new crops and tropical trees. These could keep the land green, reduce dependence on mainland produce and create jobs for an estimated 1,500 cane workers. State tax codes also encourage agricultural use by raising property values if land goes fallow.

But sugar growers on tourist-heavy Oahu, fearing that they may not be able to turn a profit on diversified crops or afford to pay higher taxes on fallow fields, are also entertaining plans for major subdivisions and resorts.

No one expects to see mega-resorts sprouting up soon on these fields or anywhere else on this recession-battered archipelago. Tourism is down for the third straight year, and a glut of resorts has left many of the largest hotels begging for customers.

Instead, economists predict that most of the plantation land on Oahu will be developed with small and mid-sized resorts, golf courses, commercial centers and subdivisions.

Amfac/JMB, which leases the 11,000 acres that comprise the Oahu Sugar plantation, has already turned 577 acres of fallow fields in central Oahu into a successful high-density subdivision of mostly affordable and mid-priced homes, a golf course and a shopping center.

“The plantation land on Oahu will be developed inevitably over the next decade,” said Leroy Laney, a senior economist at First Hawaiian Bank. “Also inevitable is that most of the farm workers who will be unemployed are middle-aged and older and will have a hard time finding other jobs.”

Environmentalists and agriculture officials warn of another socioeconomic problem: massive new subdivisions and resorts could saddle Oahu with expensive infrastructure projects and more overdevelopment that could alienate tourists for good.

On the other hand, reclassifying the land for urban uses could help lower housing costs on the island, where the median price of a single-family home is $350,000.

On Hawaii, which is isolated from the throngs that stream through Oahu, officials are racing to solve a more immediate problem: How to help 800 cane workers who reside in the old sugar towns that sprouted up around and depend upon the Hamakua and Hilo Processing mills.

To walk through these plantation workers’ enclaves is to travel back in time 50 years and more, when sugar was king. Board-and-corrugated tin cottages are surrounded by tidy, redolent gardens of hibiscus and birds of paradise, and tangerine, papaya and mango trees. Roosters reared for cock fighting crow all hours of the day. Clumps of freshly cut bananas ripen on doorsteps and car hoods.

Many here had parents and grandparents who came from Asia and Puerto Rico to seek their fortunes, such as they were, in the fields. They plowed, watered, cut and carried the stalks on their shoulders to mills owned mostly by persons of European descent.

The plantation owners created a lucrative empire that brought prosperity to Hawaii and, eventually, to the cane workers. Once indentured servants, they are now among the highest-paid farm workers in the world.

In fact, one problem plaguing state officials is how difficult it is to help the field workers rebuild their lives.

Some will move away in search of work, most likely low-paying service jobs tied to the $9.4-billion-a-year tourism industry.

Almost none will enjoy up to $15-an-hour wages, including benefits, again. Nor will they find housing available for the $50-a-month rent they pay to live in the company-owned camps.

Other cane workers, some of them retired, are trying to win permission to remain in their modest cottages after the plantations close.

But Ralph Cordoban, 45, is worried that it “is going to be a disaster,” whether the 21 families in his camp on the Hamakua plantation stay or go.

“Many of the people living here can’t speak English, so how can they find jobs?” asked Cordoban, a portly man of Hawaiian/Filipino descent who keeps 54 fighting roosters tethered to hutches in his front yard. “The state is trying to help us get into diversified farming, but not everyone has the knowledge to farm.”

Rick Klemm, spokesman for the century-old Hawaiian Sugar Planters Assn., called proposals to turn the sugar lands over to subsistence farmers a “self-sufficiency myth,” largely because investors are not likely to finance new crops for unproven markets.

Even if they did, he said, family farms would account for only a small fraction of the land being freed by plantation closures.

“It would only take a few thousand acres to grow all the crops needed to keep all Hawaii alive,” Klemm said. “What’s to become of all the rest of the available farmland?”

“That is exactly the question we are grappling with now,” responded Gerald Hagino, chairman of the state Senate agriculture committee.

“Unfortunately, these fields are not all in one type of land or climate; the closures on Hawaii present different problems than the ones on Oahu,” Hagino said. “Another problem is that most of these lands are private, and we may not have much say in what becomes of them.”

The seeds of the present conflict were planted more than 30 years ago when the islands’ economy changed abruptly with the simultaneous advent of jet travel, rising land values, higher wages for unionized agriculture workers and competition from the Third World.

Now, sugar production on Oahu and Hawaii--the state’s leading economic activity for more than 100 years and the reason it became part of the United States--is withering away.

A few growers, such as Alexander & Baldwin Inc., have invested heavily in technological advancements and cost-cutting programs that will enable plantations on Maui and Kauai to remain efficient and profitable for years.

Statewide, however, the highly mechanized industry now accounts for only about 1% of Hawaii’s employment. Sugar production has fallen from about 1 million tons in 1987 to about 675,000 tons a year ago.

Only in recent months has Gov. John Waihee created task forces to try to preserve the year-round agricultural industry and help sugar-town residents through the difficult adjustment period by retraining them for possible jobs in hotel and golf course operations. The success of such programs, however, is iffy at best because hotels and resorts are laying off workers.

Meanwhile, most of the once-mighty sugar producers are now “land banks” waiting to convert their property for higher economic urban uses, according to Ira Rhoter, co-chairman of Hawaii’s Green Party.

“Clearly, their intention is to keep limping along in agriculture for tax advantages and then develop tourist centers,” Rhoter said. “I believe we should get a hold of some of this land right now and start diversified agriculture projects instead of moving toward mega-development.”

Still, pressure to develop the choicest portions of these fields is accelerating. And second-hand stores are filling up with plantation memorabilia that is selling faster than local handicrafts.

Even the five-story Hamakua mill is up for sale as scrap metal. But Bouvet is hoping that “a Third World country, maybe Pakistan or Vietnam, will buy the whole thing and hire me to help set it up.”

The plantation superintendent’s home at Hamakua--a 5,000-square-foot house surrounded by a botanical garden with a magnificent view of Maui--has already changed hands.

“The old house has been lost to a developer,” Bouvet said, “who wants to turn it into a bed-and-breakfast inn or a hotel catering to upper-end overseas travelers.”