The New York Times recently published an investigation of the abusive conditions in the sugar cane industry in Maharashtra, India. India is the world’s second largest producer of sugar.
Workers are virtual slaves because they owe money to employers either because they were forced by poverty to borrow or inherited the debt from impoverished parents.
Instead of being paid wages, migrant agricultural workers in Maharashtra receive an advance when the harvest season, but because of the irregularity of work and the lack of oversight of employers, they often end up owing money, which means they are forced to return year after year.
Women are the most abused. Girls are pushed into child marriages so they can work along aside their “husbands” and women laboring in the cane fields are coerced into having hysterectomies, so their menstrual cycle does not interfere with work quotas. They fall into deeper debt peonage because they borrow from employers to pay for the procedure.
Bonsucro, which sets standards for the Indian sugar industry, issues a seal of approval certifying safe conditions in the sugar fields and mills. Under pressure, it now promises to establish a human rights task force.
Coca-Cola is a major purchaser of sugar from the Maharashtra cane fields. Coke, Pepsico, Unilever, and General Mills all claim the Bonsucro seal means their supply chain is not abusive of worker health and safety, which is a lie. Coca-Cola and Pepsico claim that they are looking into the problems in the sugar industry.
Labor abuse in sugar cane production has been going on for centuries. Profits from sugar production by enslaved Africans from the early seventeenth up until the late nineteenth century in the Caribbean and Brazil fueled the Industrial Revolution in Europe and the United States.
Conditions were so brutal that there were major slave revolts in Haiti, Brazil, and Jamaica and smaller revolts on other Caribbean islands and in Louisiana. Conditions on the slave plantations were so horrific that new arrivals from Africa rarely survived more than seven years.
As African slavery gradually ended in the Caribbean, Great Britain replaced enslaved African workers on the sugar plantations with indentured servants from India. Almost a half a million people were transported to the Caribbean between the 1830s and the start of the First World War.
Indian laborers agreed to work for a plantation owner for five years in return for passage, housing, food, and medical attention. Despite promises, the casualty rate for “Coolies” was high and the British Colonial Secretary eventually declared he was “not prepared to encounter the responsibility of a measure which may lead to a dreadful loss of life on the one hand, or, on the other, to a new system of slavery.”
New York had ties to sugar production and slave system in both the colonial period and in the first half of the 19th century. In the 17th century, Nathaniel Sylvester (1610–1680), used his Shelter Island estate and a workforce of twenty-four enslaved people to provide food stuffs and wood products to his sugar plantation in Barbados.
By the 18th century, half of the ships leaving the port of New York were engaged the trade of sugar and slaves with European West Indies colonies. The two leading slave-trading families in 18th century New York were the Philipses and the Livingstons.
The Philipse family owned over 50,000 acres of land in Westchester County and had one of the largest slaveholdings in the colonial North.
Livingston was a benefactor of Yale University, a city of New York alderman, a representative at the 1754 Colonial Convention at Albany, and a delegate to the Continental Congress.
Slave auctions were held regularly, at the Wall Street Slave Market established by the City Common Council.
In 1741, colonial New Yorkers feared a slave uprising. This led to the arrest of 152 enslaved Africans and suspected white co-conspirators. Thirty-four of the enslaved Africans were executed, thirteen were burned alive. Seventy accused rebels were transported to work on Caribbean sugar plantations.
In the 19th century, the predecessor bank of Citibank financed the illegal slave trade into Cuba and the marketing of slave produced commodities in the United States and Europe. The family of a three-time city of New York mayor owned the company that morphed into the American Sugar Company and Domino Sugar.
In 1852 and 1854, The New York Times examined in detail the workings of the illegal slave trade and the extent of involvement by the city’s merchants and bankers. The men who smuggled enslaved Africans into Cuba referred to themselves as “blackbirders” and their illegal human cargo as “black ivory.”
Their favorite New York meeting place was Sweet’s Restaurant at the corner of Fulton and South streets. The men who profited by financing and participating in the illegal Atlantic Slave trade were generally able to avoid arrest and prosecution through a legal technicality that limited the jurisdiction of American courts to United States citizens.
In 1856, a city of New York deputy marshal complained “It is seldom that one or more vessels cannot be designated at the wharves, respecting which there is evidence that she is either in or has been concerned in the traffic [to Cuba].”
Europeans and then the rest of the world became addicted to sugar. Sugar transformed the baking of bread and cake, turned coffee and tea into popular beverages, and made possible the soda and chocolate revolutions. It also rots teeth, causes obesity, and contributes to an increase in diabetes.
Like the Indian goddess Shiva, cane sugar creates and destroys. It creates great profits, and as with enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil in an earlier era, it destroys the lives of the people forced to plant, tend, and harvest it.
Illustrations, from above: Sugar cane workers in India (NYT); the ruins of a sugar processing hut in Jamacia (Alan Singer); a Caribbean sugar plantation in ca. 1823; thee 18th century sugar trade; and a former Domino Sugar processing plant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (Alan Singer).
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