For one last season, luscious, green fields of sugarcane are animating Maui’s landscape.

Hulking trucks are loading pre-burned cane from the Hawaiian Corporate and Sugar Company (HC&S)’s 144th crop into the rust-colored factory where it will be rolled, shredded, squeezed and boiled into molasses. Passenger jets rumbling over the cane fields are a reminder that tourism has overtaken sugar in recent years, and assumed the role of largest industry in Maui.

For more than 150 years, the big agricultural corporations that produce sugar have been top dogs in the island’s economic life and its political governance. As the industry winds down, a new generation of activists are dreaming big of replacing sugar not only with a new agricultural model but also a new political settlement.

Tiare Lawrence, a native Hawaiian who grew up next to a sugar mill, is an activist who is instrumental in several campaigns fighting what she calls Big Ag – companies such as HC&S and Monsanto.

Lawrence watches the sugar factory belching out sweet acrid fumes and reflects on the symbolism that sugar has represented to her homeland and its peoples: “The big agricultural businesses which grew sugar as a mono-crop overthrew our Hawaiian kingdom and they stole a lot of the lands for their crops and the water for their fields. … A lot of families want to return home and farm but they need water to do that, and HC&S still keep most of the water for themselves.”

A sugar cane field on Maui, which is the last harvest to be farmed on the island. Photograph: Stephen McLaren/The Guardian

Recent controversies over diverting water from rural East Maui’s streams, using pesticides, and burning cane fields, which exacerbate respiratory illnesses, have hung over HC&S. But with 36,000 acres of land in the middle of Maui’s fertile saddle, they aren’t planning on going anywhere soon.

The company says it hopes it can still find a way to profit from their land holdings. Commenting on the end of their sugar business, Stanley M Kuriyama, executive chairman of the parent company, Alexander and Baldwin (A&B) said: “We have made every effort to avoid having to take this action. However, the roughly $30m agribusiness operating loss we expect to incur in 2015, and the forecast for continued significant losses, clearly are not sustainable, and we must now move forward with a new concept for our lands that allows us to keep them in productive agricultural use.”

Kaniela Ing, a Democratic state representative for Maui who chairs the office of Hawaiian affairs, might be expected to have sympathy for the 650 people losing their jobs at the end of this year, but he is focused on Maui’s future agricultural economy, which he thinks should include hemp. “We don’t want one mono-crop like sugar to be replaced by another like GMO corn. In reality we want diverse agriculture that is organic, rotational and can replenish the soil, and hemp is a good part of that solution.”

Access to Maui’s water resources is another big issue. Farmers on East Maui are trying to prevent A&B from making permanent the water use permits that have kept sugar cane bountiful and would be needed for their future diversification plans. On the west side, farmers are trying to reclaim access to streams that have been dammed and diverted for others including the sugar company. Hokuao Pellegrino’s eco farm sits right next to one of the streams; it used to roar down the nearby mountain and out into the ocean but is now more sedate. He claims that the water and sugar companies have been water-banking for years and preventing farmers growing taro, a starchy staple for islanders.

“The demise of sugar is their own fault. They will tell you it is because of us fighting them over the water but it’s nothing to do with the water, it’s everything to do with their business model and their archaic farming practices. The health of their soil is terrible, it has no nutrient base. They don’t fallow, they don’t rotate crops, they just burn, till, plant, burn, till, plant.”



The sugar train that used to run on the island of Maui servicing the sugar industry. Photograph: Stephen McLaren/The Guardian

The post-sugar agricultural vision for Maui is being hotly debated and Monsanto, which is appealing a moratorium on the production of GMO crops on Maui, is thought to be casting an avaricious eye on the 36,000 acres about to come up for grabs. Despite HC&S claims that they are researching diverse agricultural model to replace sugar, the fear among many who see the island’s future as being organic and closer to the traditional Hawaiian concept of Aina (“that which feeds us”) is that Monsanto will end up leasing the redundant fields and growing GMO corn.

Big Ag’s role in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 is not being easily forgotten either. Since Bill Clinton’s 1993 apology there has been pressure building for some kind of return of sovereignty to the indigenous people, but it has been a protracted and controversial process.

“It turns out that under the monarchy we were citizens, we had a bill of rights, so this isn’t about being a native Hawaiian who was here prior to Captain Cook. It isn’t about race or ethnicity, it is about nationality,” said Keoki Sousa, 72, who can be found most mornings paddling 500-meter sprints in the ocean. “My Portuguese ancestors were citizens, my Scottish and Hawaiian ancestors were citizens of the kingdom. The US government frames the whole debate it in terms of race and that suits them because they want us to settle for federal recognition like Native American tribes which is a dead-end in my view.”

Ing is pragmatic about how sovereignty might be returned to Hawaii and he regards the greater teaching of Hawaiian language in schools and a new cultural sense of self among many young Hawaiians as a harbinger of a new form of nationhood. However, when it comes to the sugar industry his view is resolute. “This is is an opportunity,” he said, “for these historically greedy missionary families who created the sugar industry to … give back what is owed to the people of Maui.”

“This is not too complicated. When you take something from someone the moral thing to do is to give it back.”