Sugar’s bittersweet legacy (1)

Sugar is sweet but its production and distribution process has a long, bitter history of indentured servitude, intergenerational poverty (especially of planters and sugar farm workers), and determining one’s socioeconomic location. In other parts of the world, the cultivation of sugarcane that produces sugar in its various processed forms is considered the result of a “bittersweet history” (see “Sugar: A Bittersweet History,” by Elizabeth Abbott, Penguin Books, 2008).

An early American colonial time historian on the Philippines, John Foreman, said that “fortunes have been made in this colony (referring to the Philippines), in cane-sugar.” The quote is from Foreman’s book written in 1906, “The Philippine Islands” and is also quoted as a blurb in a book written by John A. Larkin, history professor at the State University of New York, “Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society,” University of California Press, 1993.

In his book, Larkin investigates the impact of sugar cultivation and production in two of the country’s 17 sugar-producing provinces in the Philippines: Pampanga and Negros Occidental. He traces the history of the production of sugar from colonial times (Spanish and American) to the present (prior to the publication of his book). Larkin posits that sugar became a very important social determinant during colonial times, clearly delineating the boundaries between the elite plantation-owning class—who was extremely wealthy—and the impoverished sugar plantation workers. By investigating the details of the history of the sugar industry in the two provinces, Larkin describes in detail the impact of colonial economic forces that gave rise to a wealthy elite of sugar growers. As Larkin notes, “whether in capitalist areas like Hawai’i and Louisiana, in colonies such as the Philippines and Java, or in the socialist milieu of Cuba, market forces have reinforced the old powerful mill owners and grossly underpaid field hands.”

Sugar plantation owners were supported by a retinue of workers, organized by their social status in the sugar hacienda hierarchy. Larkin also notes that the country’s dependence on the international market also contributed to the widening of the gap between the rich (sugar plantation owners) and their workers. Larkin concludes that the sugar industry contributed widely to the stunting of the Philippine economic development, a wide chasm among the Filipino people, and an imbalance of political power—all of which still haunt the country up to this day.

Abbott’s more recent work on the history of sugar production and processing also describes how sugar cultivation and slavery gave rise to the flourishing trans-Atlantic slave trade and wrecked the lives of African slaves, and made some white sugar planters and absentee investors filthy rich. One of its despicable outcomes was the rise of racism that justified the enslavement of Africans in planting sugarcane under the heat of the Caribbean sun. In Abbott’s words, “black slaves became sugar machines,” and failure on the part of the enslaved Africans to meet their daily planting quotas meant that they were to be flogged. For Abbott, sugar was then “literally polluted with slaves’ blood.”

As of 2005, the Philippines was the ninth largest sugar producer in the world, and the second largest sugar producer among members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, second to Thailand. This was in a report released by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Seventeen provinces in the country produce sugar, with the two Negros provinces accounting for half of the country’s total sugar production. In the recent past, the country had a long history of exporting sugar, as one of our prime export commodities. Our raw sugar used to be exported to the United States, England, and Australia, while crystal grain sugar was mainly exported to Spain.

Just recently, several market owners and manufacturers of sugar-based products have complained about a shortage of sugar and urged the importation of sugar for their manufacturing requirements. This led to the recently concluded “consensus” meeting of stakeholders in the sugar industry to agree on importing 150,000 metric tons of sugar.

(To be continued.)

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