Cane reeds, freshly harvested to preserve a high water content, begin their journey into the Santa Rosa sugar refinery in Aguadulce. The process takes 24 hours from field to bag.
Trucks laden with stocks of freshly-harvested cane reeds were buzzing about the Interamerican Highway near Panama's southern city of Aguadulce, leaving a trail of dried cane leaves scattered on the route. Approaching the end of the dry season, the region was wrapping up its frenzied production of sugar for the year. I met with Santa Rosa refinery's Daniel Quirus for a closer look at the creation of the magnificent spice that Americans happily consume at the rate of 30 kilograms per head annually.
Barely over the hum of whirling machinery designed to forcefully crush the cane into a sweet juice, Daniel explained how three shifts of factory workers, comprising a fleet of four thousand, usher the juice through the machinery, following a particular recipe of boiling, condensing, and crystallizing. The entire process, from open field to sealed bag, takes only 24 hours. The night shift crew earns a little more; all employees, however, can bring home some of the fruits of their labor to their kitchens, although after monitoring a dizzying procession of thousands of sugar bags a day, I bet one might be inclined to lose one's sweet tooth. OK, maybe not.
The around-the-clock operation yields 1.5 million pounds of sugar a day, every day throughout Aguadulce's dry season, which lasts a little over three months. In one scant season, the Santa Rosa refinery produces enough sugar to make two and a half billion servings of flan --- or one flan with a diameter of four kilometers, provided that one has two billion eggs on hand.
The output seems surprising when taking into account that some of the machines that bag the sugar are fifty years old, and still churning proudly, albeit with the occasional burp. As if on cue, one of the aforementioned veteran machines jammed in front of Daniel and me. But the machine did not stop. Instead, with the dexterity of a professional percussionist, a refinery worker plucked out the recalcitrant paper clog while timing his grabs perfectly in between the merciless pounding of various metallic arms and hammers. Not a finger was lost.
Unlike many other agricultural industries, the Santa Rosa refinery boasts sustainable agricultural practices --- the refinery reuses the same hectares of land to grow cane. Most waste from the process is not waste at all; the plant burns the stalky leftover from the crushing process to heat its own steam boilers. Used water is cleaned and recycled. Another by-product of sugar refining, molasses, is actually a desirable commodity, both utilized by farmers to make feed for livestock, as well as by liquor manufacturers to produce Panama's rum.
While the new cane shoots are diligently photosynthesizing for our benefit during the long rainy season, the refinery effectively shuts down, save for a research project or two. How do the refinery workers find work for the rest of the year? "Camarones," Daniel promptly answered. Shrimp. The tasty crustaceans crawling around the cultivation pools of Aguadulce provide income for shrimp farmers, while fortifying local and national restaurants with a bounty ready for the typical preparations of al ajillo (garlic sauce), a la criolla (sweet tomato and onion sauce), and even on a pizza. For landlubbing laborers, the cane fields of nearby Colombia follow a different weather pattern, providing another possibility for seasonal income. Nonetheless, an Aguadulcen cabbie was convinced that many refinery men (no women work in the factory) live a "simple life" during the rainy season while their families take their turn to work.
The refinery not only stocks the kitchens of Panama with its product: it also exports raw sugar to the United States, where it is refined by the latter, avoiding refined sugar's caking issues and import politics alike (refining sugar is one of a shrinking number of industries where the US is active in protecting its home-turf jobs instead of outsourcing them). America's involvement in the Panamanian sugar industry does not end there, however. Many of the machines used at the refinery have been imported from the United States and are calibrated to the bizarreness of the English system of measurement, which is why the refinery does not sweeten its own country one kilogram at a time --- rather one old-fashioned pound at a time. But however one measures it, the resulting flan still tastes delicious.
