A Bittersweet Tale

...When steam began to supplant other power sources in the late eighteenth century, the need for wood grew greater...

...Much the same was true of mainland areas where sugar was to become important...

...the processing of cloth and leather...

...29, No...

...The spread of yellow fever is believed to have been hastened by the slave trade, which was closely tied to the sugar industry...

...4. The writer has seen art objects carved from such ties that had been dug up after a half century underground...

...See J.D...

...6. W.R...

...In its wake, it has left tired land, disease-infested waters, treeless terrain, and untrained workers-such that nothing seems able to replace it...

...their agricultural services specialized in cane growing...

...Is there a moral...

...The "democratization" of consumption is now a fundamental aspect of modem life...

...There was no need to spend capital on irrigation systems, no need to build terraces, no need to manure in a land where clearing new fields was less effort than striving to maintain the fertility of the old...

...5 - 2 1...

...By this time, however, their lands were covered with sugarcane...

...F OR MORE THAN A century, cane sugar was one of the most important items in world trade, and the men who organized its production and sale were movers and shakers in Eu- Scenes from a 17thropean politics as well as in century sugar plantation: European commerce...

...In addition to wood, the sugar plantations needed water, not only for animal and human consumption and everyday purposes, but also for industrial uses (and in the early period, for grinding power...

...More recently, the use of herbicides and pesticides, modem additions to scientific sugar cane agriculture, contaminate the water and poison the soil...

...The importance of deforestation cannot be exaggerated, as much additional environmental degradation turns on it...

...Wood was used for construction of all sorts-in the coastal Guianas, for example, there is a shortage of building stone...

...Wherever peasant adaptations emerged (often less injurious to the environment), they did so in the face of plantation resistance...

...The great Trinidadian historian, Eric Williams, once remarked on the irony that so sweet a substance as sugar should have caused such bitterness and bloodshed...

...Irrigation ditches also provided excellent breeding grounds for the malaria-carrying Anopheles mosquito...

...Such alterations had been occurring for countless millennia in Eurasia and Africa, but not in America...

...First domesticated in New Guinea, first processed into a granular product in India/Iran around the start of the Christian Era, and first becoming known to the Europeans around the eighth century, the sugar cane plant reached the New World with Columbus in 1493, on his second voyage...

...Large populations, coerced locally or transferred by force to the New World from elsewhere, did the work...

...Soon cane cultivation spread over vast insular and mainland areas, and the industrial plants needed to process it had been established wherever it was grown...

...They resulted from colonial programs aimed at satisfying European objectives: the extraction of immense quantities of metallic ores, precious stones, and dyewoods...

...3. J.H...

...6 When the south coast irrigation system was built in Puerto Rico at the turn of the century, sugar workers, especially those working in irrigation, showed sharp increases in parasitic diseases...

...3 Though the resources (as well as the profligacy) would not endure, the initial conditions encouraged waste and, in most places, a tradition of waste...

...and the production of spices, foods, and alcoholic beverages, all destined to be consumed in Europe...

...millions of coerced Africans and Asians shinned to the New World, and millions of Europeans encouraged to use sugar and stimulant beverages, sometimes in place of the foods they had previously eaten...

...But (clockwise from above) after the Haitian Revolu- holing a cane-piece...

...and their labor forces, dragged to the New World to produce sugar, were equipped to do little else...

...After 1650 and until the mid-nineteenth century, most of the sugar sold on the world market was produced from New World cane...

...Goodyear, "The Sugar Connection: A New Perspective on the History of Yellow Fever," Journal of the History of Medicine, No...

...When millions of plantation workers dreamed of a peasant lifestyle on their own land, it was systematically denied them...

...none had been significantly altered by human occupance...

...In British Guiana, for example, where control of subsurface waterrequired tremendous drainage and irrigation projects, the slaves moved by hand one hundred million tons of mud to build the dams, polders, and irrigation ditches the system required...

...But it was even more important as a fuel to convert the canejuice into sugar, and the molasses into rum...

...In the 1830s, commercial production of sugar from the sugar beet was perfected in Europe...

...Caribbean islands, once the proud possessions of half a dozen leading European colonial powers, became little K1UK I U1 N 1TH AMLKICAN I i 24 24more than embarrassing liabilities...

...As late as the 1920s, railroad ties were being cut from lignum vitae, mahogany, tachuelo, and other precious tropical hardwoods in Puerto Rico, where narrow-gauge railroads were established to transport cane...

...A medicine, spice, and luxury of kings in the sixteenth century was transformed into a necessity of Europe's toiling masses by the eighteenth...

...The extirpation of local biota in Barbados, together with the conversion of the land to cane planting, led within a decade to planter complaints about soil degradation...

...52 (1978), pp...

...though now with less and less enthusiasm and profit...

...4 Watts writes that the establishment of sugar in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century brought about the "virtual total removal of the ecologically intricate stable tropical seasonal and rainforest, along with the associated coastal scrub....The speed with which this was effected must be almost without a parallel in an agricultural area...

...2 From about 1520 onward, the energies of New World colonists were increasingly bent to producing this precious good...

...One expert writes: "The initial response of the first sugar cane planters to this abundance of resources was to abandon the conservationist practices that were hallmarks of the industry in the Old World...

...In northeast Brazil and the coastal Guianas, as well as in the Greater Antilles, all of them areas of pioneering sugar production, fresh and fertile land, plentiful water, abundant forest, and ample sunshine made their promise far greater than that of any of the Old World sugar regions...

...In the 1940s, when I researched Puerto Rican sugar, men commonly stood barelegged in the irrigation ditches while they worked, and washed themselves off with the same water when they left work...

...Each such daily experiVOLUME XXV, NUMBER 2 (SEPTEMBER 1991) 23Envirt onmen th Am Environment other islands, and its predations are responsible for the extinction of at least six Antillean faunal species...

...Domingue (Haiti), and British Jamaica, then finally to the Hispanic Caribbean yet again...

...a tion (1791-1804), the plan- mill-yar...

...It is no more possible to think of the African diaspora without thinking of sugar, than it is to imagine the creation of the vast New World sugar empires without enslaved African labor...

...Now that epoch has passed, and seems irretrievable...

...The long-term environmental costs of the repression of a peasant way of life are incalculable...

...Even more sugar (though mostly for local use) was produced in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Louisiana, and elsewhere in the Americas...

...a boiling tations began a long decline...

...Yet in scale and in rapidity of change, the postColumbian alterations were unprecedented...

...Many of the large-scale ecological changes the Americas soon suffered were not haphazard occurrences...

...Now, the lands that made this wealth possible, and the descendants of the peoples who worked those lands, are much the poorer...

...The consequences of such alterations of the natural landscape are immense...

...Galloway, The Sugar Cane Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 63...

...Sugar is a good example of how changes set in motion by the introduction of new crops, new industrial plants and new peoples, got played out...

...1, pp...

...But most of the workers were from Africa...

...Despite its revolution, Cuba has not found ways to escape its role as sugar-producer for the developed world (first Spain, then the United States, now the Soviet Union...

...In its name land was laid waste...

...At least two tall tree species were made extinct, and there was "an equivalent destruction of fauna...

...In the Dominican Republic the sugar industry is in perpetual crisis, aggravated by the terrible labor conditions imposed on its migrant Haitian work force...

...Yet, when one looks at what sugar has done to native peoples, and natural environments, the ironies are even greater...

...many were (and continued to be) Native Americans...

...To this day, large areas of the Americas-in Louisiana and Florida, coastal Peru, northeast Brazil, interiorMexico, the Dominican Republic, and, of course, Cuba, among others-are still dedicated to the production of this sweet white substance...

...In many American economies, the sugar industry disadvantaged alternative agrarian systems...

...From the early sixteenth century until the creation of the fossil-fuelled factory central nearly 400 years later, the sugar plantation was the single biggest destroyer of Caribbean forest resources...

...s In tropical environments, most nutrients are stored in plant life, not in the soil...

...219-223...

...Sidney W. Mintz teaches anthropology at Johns Hopkins University...

...Deforestation, the killing off of local fauna, the nutrient depletion of the soil, and the intensification of island-wide surface evaporation, all came about because of the cane plantation economy...

...Only a few decades after Columbus, some of the same kinds of change-deforestation, soil exhaustion, erosion, pollution, and the spread of new diseases-were actively underway in the New World.' As the Conquest proceeded-first in the Antilles, Middle America and Mexico, later on the South and North American mainlands-Old World populations, domestic animals, crops, sicknesses and technologies were introduced, soon to be followed by masses of enslaved people...

...His most recent book is Sweetness and Power (Penguin, 1986...

...86-94...

...Jamaica and Martinique had become "sugar islands," and Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Brazil, "sugar countries...

...In its name, courts and courtiers, slave traders and planters, refiners and confectioners grew wealthy...

...Coarse granular sugar was being made in Santo REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 22Domingo and shipped to Spain by 1516...

...The countryside is emptying out ever more rapidly...

...The mainland American sugar industries, except for Brazil, ended up producing mostly for the domestic market...

...their ports and wharves were organized for the sugar trade...

...Destruction of forest cover deprives wildlife of food and protection, soil of retention and nutrients, and, eventually, the affected region of rainfall...

...By the time technical improvements in the seventeenth century had made it possible to stoke the cauldron fires with dried cane trash, many of the primeval forests of the Caribbean islands and even of substantial mainland regions had already been cut...

...Besides destroying the natural habitat, they contributed to the spread and virulence of particular diseases, including bilharziasis (schistosomiasis) and malaria...

...2. All of this spectacular (and often destructive) change is more understandable in light of the vast transformation of the work, eating, and social habits of Europe itself, which was linked to the discovery of the New World...

...Country after country illegalized the slave trade, then abolished slavery itself...

...Over the centuries, the American centers of production shifted from the Hispanic Caribbean (Santo Domingo and Cuba), to Portuguese Brazil, then to Dutch Guiana (Suriname), French St...

...In Brazil, the industry is kept alive mainly by heavily subsidized methyl alcohol production An economy once imposed on millions of people, most of them unwilling, over the course of centuries, has now become totally unworkable...

...Roads, railroads, and agricultural extension services always catered to the plantations: the best alluvial flatlands were always monopoloized by them...

...eventually Asians, too, would be added to the picture...

...Jobin, "Sugar and Snails: The Ecology of Bilharriasis related to Agriculture in Puerto Rico," American Journal of Tropical Medical Hygiene, Vol...

...Competitive sugar economies developed in other parts of the world...

...their streams were dammed and transformed into irrigation ditches...

...Some laborers, particularly at first, were coerced Europeans...

...M OST OF THE CARIBBEAN ISLANDS WERE heavily wooded in 1492...

...Native Americans had altered the locales which they exploited from the time of their original entry in the Hemisphere, by hunting and fishing and gathering food, by the use of fire and by woodcutting, and, later, by plant and animal domestication, mining and metallurgy, monumental building, terracing, irrigation works, and so on...

...Though irrigation did not become an important aspect of plantation development in most regions until the nineteenth century, from early on water had to be controlled and managed...

...their roads and railroads serviced the plantations...

...Though sugar has nearly vanished from Puerto Rico, nothing that grows has taken its place...

...By the time electrically-powered central factories were grinding cane at the end of the nineteenth century, Caribbean forests were mostly gone, those in many mainland areas grievously depleted...

...But no one seems prepared to calculate the costs nnat nr nrepent 1 vuLumn AY, InuIOln Z rvn yl)(rM 25 th costs past or .present A Bittersweet Tale 1. Such changes were not unknown to indigenous New World civilizations...

...5. David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp...

...The importation of domestic animals such as the horse, the donkey, and the ox, though not solely due to sugar, has also done its share to destroy the local environment, particularly (but not only) by overgrazing on substandard land...