EPILOGUE
THE COSTS AND
BENEFITS

Much of the history of sugar of the past four centuries seems to involve the jostlings of various European countries: the Dutch with the Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, Germany with everybody, England with America and, most famously, England with France. The history of sugar also involves the predation of those countries on the nationals of many other lands, either by deliberate enslavement or in the more polite guise of indentured servitude, barely a notch above slavery.

In these more enlightened times sugar slaves are often replaced by machines, but there are still parts of the world where the back-breaking task of hand-harvesting sugar cane goes on, and the lot of the sugar worker today is little better than that of the slave of yesteryear.

Sugar has caused the mass movement and death of millions of humans. It has resulted in the large-scale clearance of land and the destruction of soil and whole environments. On the plus side, it has provided us with many taste delights, and had a beneficial effect on the economies of many nations.

Sir Eric Williams, a Marxist scholar and Trinidad’s first Prime Minister, argued first in his doctoral thesis, and later in his book Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944, that the sugar and slave trade had provided the pump-priming, the finance, for the Industrial Revolution in Europe, although this is now generally regarded as an extreme viewpoint. Sugar slavery probably did no harm to the European economy in providing working capital in Britain and France, but Germany managed to industrialise without colonies, slaves or cane sugar.

Sugar was never the friend of socialism. When the British Labour government planned in 1949 to nationalise the sugar industry, the main British producer, Tate and Lyle, fought back, sending sugar out in bags labelled ‘Tate not State’. Sugar had a great effect on Marxist Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1969 announcement that the country was to aim for a 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970, to earn money to fund industrialisation. While the harvest was a record at 8.5 million tons, the sugar-led recovery failed, for the Cuban economy was in tatters because of the over-emphasis on one product. Cuba returned after that to a more normal Marxist economy based on the Russian model.

One of the most unusual effects of sugar is seen in the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 15 January 1919. According to some accounts, there had been a rush to import as much molasses as possible in order to make and sell as much rum as possible before Prohibition came into force. The flood was caused by an overfilled storage tank bursting and flooding the streets with a two and a half metre wave of molasses that killed 21 people, crumpled the steel support of an elevated train, and knocked over a fire station. The story has often been told since, usually with a wry comment about the victims meeting a sticky end. It is another example of the way sugar products can be dangerous, though the main problems have been environmental.

Sugar cane is a tropical crop and, like coral animals, does best in the tropics. In Florida, the Caribbean, Australia and Mauritius, mangrove swamps, seagrass beds and coral reefs are all under threat from increased sediment and fertiliser run-off from the fields of sugar cane, moving down the rivers and into the sea. The main nurseries supporting new generations of life in the sea are under serious threat because of the way sugar is grown on the land. Part of the problem is that consumers do not pay anything like the true cost of sugar, any more than they did in the days of slavery. The costs of environmental destruction cannot be readily converted into dollar amounts, and so they are largely ignored.

Yet there are solutions, and some of them are simple, like ‘green cane trash blanket harvesting’, which leaves a cover of organic material on the cane fields that minimises sediment movement, which can be significant during heavy rainfall. This can be done because mechanical harvesting does not require that the cane fields be burnt as they were previously to prevent the cane-cutters contracting leptospirosis, the germs of which are left on the cane by rats. If the cane stalks are left on the soil after harvest as a trash blanket, the headlands, the strips around the outside of the cane fields that are used for machinery access, will be the only remaining major sediment source.

All farming results in a steady run-off of pesticides and fertiliser, but the location of the cane fields makes them a particular problem. In some places the environmental damage is even worse. Liquid waste from sugar mills and refineries, material called vinasse, is discharged directly into the sea on Guadeloupe, for example, causing a serious breakdown of the marine environment. If we need sweetness in our food, perhaps we should seek other ways of finding it, because right now our joint human sweet tooth looks set to cause a nasty abscess in the environment.

ÖSTERMALMSGLÖGG

500 mL vodka, 330 mL strong beer, 750 mL Madeira, 3 dried figs, 150 grams raisins, 20 peeled almonds, 3 bitter orange peel, 1 cinnamon stick, ginger, 300 mL sugar, 6 cloves, 10 cardamons. Chop the figs into four pieces. Mix all spices except the sugar, add the beer and boil it. Add the sugar and boil until the sugar has melted. Let it cool, then add the vodka, and reheat gently—no more than 55°C (130°F) or the vodka will evaporate. Let it stand for an hour, add the Madeira, and let it stand for another hour. Pour the glögg through a mesh (but keep almonds and raisins) into bottles. Warm to no more than 55°C before serving.

Swedish recipe (modern)