After having travelled by air and land for more than eight hours, I found myself in the quiet district of Jatiroto in the Lumajang Regency of East Java, Indonesia. There, under the bright July sun, is a slow procession of big trucks loaded with sugarcane on their way to the local sugar factory – a sweet story is unfolding.
Jatiroto has an area of more than five thousand hectares which is home to more than 50,000 people. It is one of the centers of sugarcane production in the regency and its surrounding areas. According to a report by the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agricultural Service (USDA FAS), East Java accounts for nearly half of the country's sugarcane production. This is where I meet the cheerful Haji Suwarso, a 67-year-old second generation sugarcane farmer. He used to be a government officer, but he is now a fulltime farmer since 1997.
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