One aspect of globalisation – the gradual abolition of trade preferences – has brought wrenching reform to the Mauritian sugar industry, once the country’s economic dynamo.

At independence in 1968 and for the first dozen years thereafter, Mauritius was a sugar economy, producing more than 620,000 tonnes a year in the 1970s and early 1980s, employing upwards of 50,000 people or a third of the workforce and responsible for 40 per cent of exports.