Sugar and Oppression

After reading this essay, your sugar may not taste as sweet.

The following information is drawn from Sidney Mintz's  Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985.

In a foreword picture, we find the following quotation from J.H. Bernardin de Saint Pierre (1773):

"I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of the two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them."

Raising sugar cane is a labor intensive process.  Slave labor has been officially outlawed, but often cane cutters are treated as semi-slaves.  Mints reports that he ' would sometimes stand by the line of cutters, who were working in intense heat and great pressure, while the foreman stood at their backs. . . . Only the sound of the whip was missing."

Why were massive quantities of sugar grown?  It took "huge quantities of land, labor, and capital" to produce sugar.  The enormous demand comes from areas such as Europe and America.  The price of sugar often fluctuates widely due to overproduction and/or speculation.

Cane workers were not farmers or peasants; they did not own the land nor was this their business.  "They were agricultural laborers who owned neither land nor any productive property and who had to sell their labor to eat.  Usually a multinational corporation owned or leased the land and the sugar mill."

"England fought the most, conquered the most colonies, imported the most slaves and went furtherest   and fastest in creating a plantation system.  The most important product of that system was sugar."