Tears roll from Mohammad Ahmad Khan's eyes as he gazes at the trees he planted to mark the birth of each of his 10 children. Soon he will dismantle his ramshackle house, pack up his modest belongings and join thousands of Fijian farmers who are leaving their land.

Khan is a victim of British colonial history, the ethnic divide running through this South Pacific archipelago, and the fickle world market for sugar.

Khan belongs to a 43-percent minority descended from Indian laborers who were imported to Fiji when it was part of the British empire. The 50-year-old farmer has lived on this 3-acre sugar cane farm all his life. His father died here, as did three of his children.

For a long time the ethnic groups lived in peace, but everything changed when a military coup in 2000 ousted Fiji's first elected prime minister of Indian descent. Indigenous Fijians, who own more than 90 percent of the land under laws devised a century ago by the British, started refusing to renew leases held by ethnic Indians.

"Sugarcane is the backbone of this country," Khan said. But his lush, green fields don't yield enough profit to keep his children in farming, he said.

Sugar represents 30 percent of Fijian industry and is in steady decline due to inefficient production and high labor costs. Mineral water, the Fijian export that is finding a niche among Western water connoisseurs, can't fill the gap. Sugar production has fallen from 4.1 million tons in 1995 to 3 million tons in 2004, the Asian Development Bank says.

The screws are set to tighten further as the European Union, which imports most Fijian sugar, shrinks subsidies by 39 percent over the next four years, according to the bank's recent report.

In Fiji, a nation of 820,000 spread over about 110 inhabited islands, land and the uncertain economy are the issues dominating Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase's run for re-election. Qarase, an indigenous Fijian, promises to seek a solution acceptable to landlord and tenant alike. But at a campaign appearance outside the northern town of Tavua, he acknowledged he had no immediate answers.

Speaking to The Associated Press, he insisted the Asian Development Bank's sugar forecast "is not correct," and "There won't be thousands of people leaving the cane industry."

He said his government has hired consultants from India to recommend ways of saving the industry and is investing in technology to make sugar mills more efficient.

The government is also trying to develop the use of sugar cane fibers to produce energy, "So we will have three products - sugar plus electricity plus ethanol," he said. Studies indicate that together they will make the industry viable even after EU subsidies decline, he said.

Dayaram said his lease expired shortly after the 2000 coup, and he wasn't allowed to renew it. With almost no land available to buy, Dayaram and his wife were forced to move in with family members and each of their three children went to stay with other relatives.

Thousands of other Indians have left the country, many heading to India or New Zealand. Others have ended up in squatter camps on the outskirts of the capital, Suva.

Outside the tiny shack where Dayaram now lives, a tarp covers a tidy bundle of scrap metal and wooden beams - all that he could salvage from his former home.

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