Cuilionn, thanks for your insights about the connection between slavery and certain crops. Although the bulk of these crops were (and still are)luxuries -- sugar, opium, tea, chocolate, coca, coffee -- some of them, like rubber, quinine (to combat malaria) and cotton were not.

Here's a some points to ponder about slavery and sugar cane ...

"One such seminal crop is sugar cane, the propagation of which, on a large scale, accelerated colonization of the Caribbean islands and led to a massive Africa-America slave trade, whereby 10-13 million people were forcefully brought to the New World (Hobhouse, 1986)....

Now, let's think about sugar for a moment. Nobody needs sugar. You can go from birth to the grave without ever having a teaspoon full of white sugar. You will never miss it.

Throughout the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, a medicine. It was used to pack wounds, to keep wounds septic. And it was very expensive and there was very little of it. Nobody even knew where it came from. It was called cane honey, because they knew it came from some kind of jointed grass, but nobody had a clear picture of what sugar was.

Well, when you extract sugar from sugar cane, it requires, in pre-modern technology, a temperature of about 130 degrees. You cannot -- free men will not work sugar. It's too unpleasant. You faint, you die from heat prostration. You have to take prisoners and you have to chain them to the sugar vats.

And so, in the fifty years before the discovery of America, they began growing sugar cane in the east Atlantic islands, Medeira and the Canary Islands. And they brought Africans, and sold them into slavery specifically for sugar production ...

In 1800, every ounce of sugar entering England was being produced by slave labor of the most brutal and demeaning sort. And there was very little protest over this. It was just accepted. To this day, sugar cultivation in the third world is a kind of institutionalized slavery ... All of Christian civilization acquiesced in the bringing back of a practice that had been discredited during the fall of Rome, in order to supply the insatiable need for sugar. It was an addiction. It had no cultural defense whatsoever."


In South America, the discovery of rubber's uses by English/Peruvian businessmen in the early 1900's led to the virtual enslavement of the indigenous populations on the borders of Columbia and Peru. It's estimated that 100,000 native and "colonizing" peoples died during the cruelty of that period.

WHen the rubber craze died down, production turned to coca. Today, the "peasant" descendants of the "rubber slaves" in Columbia are still living in absolutely deplorable conditions, still enslaved economically by international markets for crack and cocaine. The cultivation of coca and the surrounding violence/guerrilla warfare has devastating environmental as well as human costs.

Here's an example of a present-day folksong from the Caquetá Region of Colombia, wrenched from the suffering of the poor campesinos caught in the stranglehold of the coca plantations:

One could easily conclude that coca is both a socio-economic and an ecological tragedy. Even if people see this, it seems that there is no alternative. A very well-known song in the area says:

Soy coquero, me paro y to digo, que solo no estoy hay muchos conmigo que estamos en este trabajo maldito ya estamos adentro y no hay como salirnos.

(I am a coca maker, I stand up and admit it, but I'm not alone; there are many with me doing this cursed work we are trapped by it and there's no way out!)

The rest of the article is here.

daylia