Hawaii’s past as a major world sugar producer is integral to understanding its history.

For more than 150 years, the islands were an important exporter of a commodity with uniquely broad appeal. In fact, as Thanksgiving reminds us, no holiday happens without sugar.

“This country is the king of the sugar world,” visiting journalist Mark Twain wrote in 1866, during the reign of King Kamehameha V.

Sugar cultivation changed Hawaii, its landscape and its people. Streams were channeled in new directions to cultivate lush green fields of cane. Tens of thousands of workers from Japan, China, Korea, the Philippines and Portugal were recruited to grow the crop, transforming a majority-Hawaiian country into a complex mélange of cultures and ethnicities.

Sugar became Hawaii’s economic bulwark and its major employer. It was also controversial, raising serious concerns about the environment and water use. Those debates continue today.

Hawaii’s last sugar plantation was shut down in 2016. But one man, now retired and living in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, had a unique vantage point into the industry’s rise and fall.

Jack Roney was Hawaii’s last full-time sugar lobbyist in Washington. He was the point man negotiating tariffs and domestic economic policy to advance Hawaii’s sugar industry in a time that political opinions about trade policy were undergoing major change.

On a recent chilly and gray November morning, in a long interview in a Northern Virginia coffee shop, Roney, 73, reminisced about the desperate political fight to save the industry — an intense and emotional effort that eventually failed.

Still tall and lanky, his dark hair now snowy white, Roney teared up at times as he recalled those years when he worked closely with sugar farm owners, labor leaders and Hawaii’s congressional delegation to protect and preserve the industry.

Roney knew very little about Hawaii when he was recruited to become the Washington representative of the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association. He was an expert on the sugar industry, having climbed fast at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he was an economist who helped the agency prepare its deliberative and widely followed commodity price forecasts.

It was 1989 and Roney knew Hawaii’s industry was in trouble. Globalization and shifting attitudes about domestic trade protection had taken root and many American manufacturers and agricultural producers, including the once-profitable Hawaii sugar business, were already on the ropes. Four plantations closed down between 1971 and 1982, including Kilauea Sugar on Kauai, Kahuku Sugar on Oahu and both Kohala Sugar and Puna Sugar on the Big Island.

Hawaii state lawmakers were also deeply worried. In 1987, they commissioned an “action plan” to try to save the industry. In that year, they noted, 184,181 acres of Hawaii’s land were planted in sugarcane, and the industry employed 6,500 people in Hawaii directly and about 25,000 people indirectly.

In addition to the jobs that would be lost if the industry disappeared, wide swaths of Hawaii’s terrain would look different if the industry failed. “Green canefields would return to weeds and scrub,” they wrote.

Hawaiian sugar farmers decided they needed a Washington insider and they begged Roney to take the job advocating for their industry. The idea appealed to him. But Roney’s wife Deborah disagreed. At age 38, Roney already had lifetime job security with the government, and his wife, who was eager to start a family, thought shifting to the private sector was a risky move.

But advocates for Hawaii have always known the best way to get help is to invite people here to experience its magic for themselves. So Francis “Frannie” Morgan, chairman of the board of the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association and owner of Hamakua Sugar Plantation on the Big Island, arranged for Roney and his wife to visit the islands and see things for themselves. Deborah agreed to come along for a few days.

Roney studied up in preparation for the visit. A native of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the home of novelist James Michener, he knew that Michener had written a book about the state. Michener’s “Hawaii,” published in 1959, was a big thick tome but Roney sped through it on the flight out. After they arrived, Morgan, friendly with a grandfatherly air, showed Roney around, taking them not just to the sugar mills and fields but also to visit schools, clinics and theaters supported by the sugar industry.

Roney was surprised and intrigued to learn that Morgan was a fifth-generation descendant of one of the early missionary families who had come to the islands and whose lives were described fictionally in Michener’s book.

Morgan, who grew up on Kualoa Ranch on Oahu, was also gambling on Hawaii’s sugar future, having invested a good bit of his family’s money to try to rescue Hamakua Sugar, the second-largest plantation in the state. It employed about 1,000 workers, when its owner Theo H. Davies & Co., decided to leave the industry. Morgan paid $69.5 million for it in 1984.

Deborah and the two men spent a long afternoon together at Hamakua Ranch, in an office that overlooked green sugarcane fields and the Pacific Ocean, while Morgan made a stirring pitch for Roney’s help. Morgan was dedicated to trying to preserve workers’ jobs and what he saw as a uniquely Hawaiian way of life. He believed that the sugar industry could be saved if U.S. trade policies aligned with global sugar prices long enough for Hawaiian sugar companies to earn enough money to invest in new machinery to boost productivity.

“He made a very strong case for how embedded they all were in the culture and how important it was to the people of the Big Island,” Roney said. “He was so passionate and so committed to this cause.”

As they left the office, Roney knew he wanted to sign on. He hesitated, waiting to hear what his wife would say.

“But then Debi leaned over — and this was a turning point in my life — she just leaned over and said, ‘Jack, I want you to try to help these people.’”

Sitting in Vienna, Virginia, 35 years later, Roney remembered that day as life-changing. He threw himself into the work, winning some victories for the industry in Washington despite opposition that became increasingly difficult to surmount.

The sugar industry relied on federal loans to support crop production, which were repaid when the crops were harvested. But influential forces opposed the program.

Candy and soft drink companies could buy sugar more cheaply from foreign countries that subsidized their sugar plantations, paid lower wages and had less rigorous environmental standards than Hawaii, Roney recalled. Then those companies found they could save even more money by using corn sweeteners instead of sugar in their products.

Hawaii’s congressional delegation was staunchly in the sugar industry’s corner. Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka and Reps. Spark Matsunaga, Patsy Mink and Neil Abercrombie forged links with lawmakers from Republican beet-growing states to make common cause for the sugar industry.

“We had the luxury of an incredibly committed Hawaii delegation,” Roney recalled.

In 1985, Mink defended Hawaii’s sugar industry in a congressional hearing, citing its high productivity, high wages and economic significance to the state.

“I was born on a sugar plantation,” she told her fellow lawmakers. “My father made a living there. Many, many thousands of people rely on the sugar company still. I moved to Waipahu after I was married, where the Oahu Sugar Company was located. And it was my sad responsibility this April recess to attend the closing of that great plantation.”

Change was coming, politically as well as financially. Free trade policies promoted by the Republicans began increasingly to be adopted by Democrats, who had earlier opposed them to protect American jobs. During the Democratic New Deal, for example, the Sugar Act had specifically protected the sugar industry, but the legislation was reversed in 1974 in favor of cheaper imports from overseas. After Democratic President Bill Clinton threw his support to the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, signing it into law, the Washington consensus was complete.

It became difficult to get even the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support the sugar industry, Roney said, because agency officials were being asked to lean on other countries to lower their trade barriers and open them for other kinds of U.S. export crops.

“So there was always that tension,” Roney recalled.

Hawaii’s sugar industry found too many powerful forces arrayed against it. Morgan’s Hamakua Sugar lost $36 million in 1991. He was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1992 and the plantation closed in 1993.

In 1946, there were 34 sugar plantations in Hawaii, but by 1997, only five remained, including two on Maui and three on Kauai. Eventually all the companies gave up trying.

In 1996, the Hawaii Sugar Planters Association shut down its Washington office, laid off Roney and his secretary, and arranged for its large library of books and annual reports about the sugar industry to be sent back to the islands. Roney had done everything he could.

“It was heart breaking,” he said.

Roney was devastated, and out of a job.

But he was soon named director of economics for the American Sugar Alliance, which worked on behalf of sugarcane and beet sugar producers nationwide. He continued to look out for Hawaii’s interests with his new employer, remaining on the trade group’s staff until his retirement in 2021.

He visited Hawaii again a few years ago, when he was invited to stay with friends on Maui’s Kaanapali Coast. Driving from the airport to West Maui, once a verdant corridor cultivated by Alexander & Baldwin’s Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., Roney saw that the landscape had grown bleak and dry.

“It was such a depressing drive to me,” he recalled. “There used to be lush fields for miles and miles. It would have been less depressing if there had been some other kind of agricultural use, but it was mostly all barren and sand.”

He remains haunted by what was lost when the August 2023 fire all but destroyed Lahaina. When he saw the footage of the fire’s devastation, he reflected on the role of the end of the sugar era and its effect on the conflagration.

“Replacing thousands of acres of lush, green, irrigated sugarcane with easily flammable scrub brush must have been a factor in the brush fires there in 2018, and, more tragically, last year,” he said. “Another sad consequence of the demise of the Hawaiian sugar industry.”