A man with a donkey cart of sugarcane straw on the Caymanas Estate. 2003. At its peak sugarcane estates in Jamaica employed 50,000 people. But a mixture of privatisation, and the end of EU quotas combined with closure of estates has hit the Jamaican sugar industry hard. In 2003 I had the opportunity of photographing the burning and harvesting of the sugarcane on the Government owned Caymanas Estate. Using outdated equipment and sugar largely cut by hand in the searing heat, workers make up a substantial number of voters. So successive Jamaican governments have made every effort to keep the industry going. Today, the island economy relies mostly on agriculture and tourism industries. The sugar industry is the oldest continually operating industry in Jamaica, generating the third largest foreign exchange for the island.