Acre for acre, the red lava soil of Hawaii is the richest sugar land in the world. Two of Hawaii's biggest sugar plantations, on the island of Maui, are Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., Ltd. and Maui Agricultural Co., Ltd. Last week, 70-year-old Frank Fowler Baldwin, ruling patriarch of Hawaii's potent Alexander & Baldwin, Ltd., combined the two companies in a $25 million merger. As a result, the new company, Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Co., Ltd., with 25,454 acres of cane land and a yearly output of 135,000 tons of sugar, becomes the largest plantation on the islands.
Over the...