Cane and Beet: Entangled Sugar Histories
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Published in Eastern Sugar
Publication cover. Designed by Peter Liška.
Annalee Davis and Ilona Németh in Conversation
(bush) Tea Services set featured at The Empire Remains Shop.
Photo Credit: Tim Bowditch (2016)
Ilona Németh: Reading your interview in The Empire Remains Shop by Cooking Sections, I felt there were so many similarities in our work, including the issue of sugar. Later I realised that we have things in common not just in terms of artistic methods, but also in social engagement, or to be more precise, in terms of the social responsibility we feel for our regions. And maybe these similarities and differences in our CVs and experiences can disclose more about the history of sugar and the colonial history of our countries of origin. So that´s why I initiated this conversation. It is not easy, because we cannot really talk about Slovakia as a colony, but I think we might reconsider whether or not we are a neo-colony. And the history of sugar has the potential to make this visible. Well, this was not a question, rather an introductory thought that you could perhaps comment on.
Annalee Davis: This exchange is fascinating for me as well because I know little about Eastern Europe and its relationship with sugar. I was therefore surprised to find images of the interior of Eastern European sugar factories in your catalogue that look very similar to a factory located across the valley from where I am here in Barbados. My studio is situated on family property, Walkers Dairy, a former sugar cane plantation operational since 1667. My paternal great-grandmother, Edith Gertrude Theodocia Davis, acquired it in 1920. Since the mid-1980s my brother, Paul Davis, converted it from a sugar cane plantation to a dairy farm– good decision because the sugar industry became bankrupt in 1986 followed by a takeover by Booker Tate in the early nineties.
It´s interesting that these geographically distant states share commonalities through the story of sugar. I believe it was around 1850 when sugar was first produced in Europe, threatening the Caribbean’s preferential access to the European market. While sugar offers some commonalities between the Caribbean and Eastern Europe, specifically through capitalism and entry to European markets, our initial relationship to its production and continued impact on our societies is markedly different. Barbados was Britain´s first sugar island. Once the wealthiest colony in the English Americas, this is where Britain perfected its colonial machinery via the plantation form, contributing to the modernization of Britain on the back of the transatlantic slave trade and the profitable sugar industry.
Whereas sugar entered the European space in the 19th century, the Sugar Revolution came to Barbados in the 1640s. Shortly thereafter, the West Indies dominated Britain’s market with this luxury product becoming one of the few places in the world where the economy preceded the society. This is a strange predicament to consider– before we became a society, we were an economic engine designed to generate wealth for European society and sweeten tea. It is out of this enigma that Caribbean society emerged with the sugar industry shaping its social and economic development beginning with European indentureship followed by African slavery and which led to the Africanization of the British West Indies.
Barbados was a heavily forested, biodiverse landscape when the settler-colonial class arrived. By the third quarter of the 17th-Century that biodiversity was eradicated to transform the island into a globalised plantation which saw with the international movement of people, money and goods.
By the late 19th and early 20th century, the sugar industry was negatively impacted by both disease and a glut on the world market given the introduction of beet sugar in a subsidised European industry. A sugar industry once with 400 factories was reduced to 14 in the late 1960s and by 2013 there was one remaining. Caribbean governments invested heavily in the production of sugar and weren’t willing to close an industry that generated considerable wealth for the region. According to J. H. Galloway, early 20th century attempts to revive the sugar industry included campaigning against the subsidisation of beet sugar at the 1902 Brussels Convention, replacing smaller mills with larger more efficient factories and breeding new varieties of cane–a progamme happening at the same time Europeans were experimenting to improve sugar beet.
Barbados eventually transitioned from one extractive monocrop economy to another–sugar to tourism–both generating much needed foreign exchange. More recently, Barbados has been grappling with having become the fourth most indebted country in the world and entered into an IMF economic recovery plan two years ago.
I.N: The roots of the sugar industry in Central Europe go back to the mid-nineteenth century, when the sugar trade with the British Empire was interrupted by the Napoleonic blockade and people were forced to somehow develop their own sugar. Research was conducted to determine which plant would be the most suitable to produce sugar and they discovered that sugar beet had the highest sugar content, though the plant was very different from that cultivated today. The sugar industry in our region is a reflexion of the entire historical period. Back then there was feudal system, which was mostly agricultural. Capitalism triggered the development of the sugar industry, although I am not saying that working conditions for the employees were excellent. In fact, it was not at all a paradise, but it´s greatest benefit was that it facilitated the industrialisation of the region. In addition to industrialisation, more organised forms of agricultural production were introduced. Some sugar factories gradually expanded sugar production by developing agricultural production. For example, at the Diószeg sugar factory, today Sládkovičovo, a cannery, mill, orchards and cattle breeding were gradually established, making it from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of World War II one of the most advanced in Europe. This not only allowed the introduction of zero waste resource management, but also ensured jobs for the employees over the whole year, because sugar production in our region is seasonal. Some companies were damaged during World War II, while some of the Jewish owners never returned from Nazi concentration camps. Shortly after World War II private property was nationalised and during the 1950s the socialist system was introduced. While the sugar industry continued to function, its further development was very problematic, as there was no money to modernise the technology. And it was under such conditions that we entered the capitalistic open market in the 1990s in Slovakia with 10 factories, 2 of which were built during the socialist period, including Juhocukor in my birthplace Dunajská Streda, which was later renamed by its French and English owners to Eastern Sugar.
The period after the fall of the Berlin Wall was the period when so called ‘wild capitalism’ started up in our region and foreign and domestic developers and investors appeared in the market, which was the beginning of another difficult period for our economy including the sugar industry.
Although in the 1990s there was a chance to merge the socialist and the capitalist approach and experiences we (in both Central and Eastern, as well Western Europe) failed to make use of the experience gained during socialism and transfer it to the new capitalist system for various reasons, such as corruption, lack of experience, being naive and, also because our region was not prepared to join the global economy. In 2004 we joined the European Union, which in 2006 introduced quotas for sugar production. So, in fact we have never had the chance to develop the industry at a global level, or to produce more sugar or reach our potential, because we were immediately subjected to quotas which restricted our production.
A.D: We have come to associate agricultural work with a sense of shame because of historical trauma. In the 1980s, the industry replaced local labour with regional labour to cut cane. In this precarious COVID-19 moment, our reliance on tourism makes us vulnerable especially in food sovereignty and Barbadians are returning to the land to establish kitchen gardens. We are noticing slow food and organic food movements and an increase in vegetarian/ vegan lifestyles. This changes conversations about farming, fostering more empowering relationships to the land in relation to sustenance and food sovereignty.
Growing awareness about medicinal qualities of wild plants like the Cerasee, for example, (a wild plant with capacity to remove parasites and detoxify the blood) means that rather than regard them as weeds and spray them with chemicals, we might study their properties to unlock other revenue streams to diversify our economy. I consider these plants–once grown in small plots of land and used by enslaved people as an apothecary–to be active agents in the decolonisation process due to their medicinal properties and regeneration of the soil. Jamaican philosopher, Sylvia Wynter, writes about the plot versus the plantation as a pre-capitalist space demonstrating use-value as a site holding tradition and memory and building communities around wild plants. As we move through and beyond shared historical trauma, repairing our relationship to lands exhausted by centuries of monocrop, extractive and exploitative farming practices through understanding the value of these wild botanicals may offer healing and empowerment.
I.N: The greatest issue in our region is to this day the overuse of fertilisers to increase the quantity of crops, which has had a negative impact on our flora and fauna including the bee populations, which is currently considered endangered. Environmental protection was not an issue during socialism, and unfortunately it is not a high priority today either. I think that we have not been fully aware of these issues, because we used more and more land for agricultural production, which resulted in the decrease of biodiversity and habitats. Many small forests between cultivated areas gradually decreased. And although I am not an expert on agriculture, as far as I know, crop rotation was used in our region instead of monocultures. At present, there are two sugar factories in operation in Slovakia, both in 100% foreign ownership, and the local growers grow the sugar beets for their production in the fields surrounding the factories. The growers also apply the system of crop rotation in their fields. Concerning the different crops, recently we witnessed the increase in growing rape for industrial purposes – as an ingredient for biofuels. There is pressure on growing so-called technical crops, which is associated with the spread of monocultures (by the way, a typical kind of economical monoculture in Slovakia is represented by the car industry). As a result of extensive agriculture, the forested areas have decreased and today we have much less forests than before. Also, here where I live, there is also a hydropower plant on the Danube, the construction of which has had serious consequences on the environment of the region.
A.D: We too have been remiss in effectively monitoring those practices to maintain public beach access and protect our own biodiversity as chemical pollution has contributed to coral reef decline and contaminated the underground aquifers. When I think about monoculture, I also think about it in terms of human relations and distorted notions of racial purity. The British Empire’s attempt at maintaining social order was not only evident in monocrop farming practices and neatly delineated rows and columns in plantation ledger pages to record information. It extended to them safeguarding notions of racial purity through policing white women´s wombs as reproductive sites to maintain white supremacy.
I.N: We could draw some parallels here with what is happening today in Central and East European countries, where due to economic and social challenges, the thinking in terms of national identities and nationalism characteristic for the nineteenth century appeared again. However, the racial issue is not relevant here. What is more relevant is the issue of national identity and religion. Ethnic nationalism is a political issue which, following the change of the political system in 1989, strengthened in the 1990s due to economic challenges. Later, the same tendency became visible in other parts of Europe as well. Today, it seems to be a general trend in different parts of the world. Although the politics show some divergent tendencies, the real-life situation, for example the COVID19 pandemic, could provide an opportunity to reconsider whether it is feasible to live locked down in a monocultural nation-state. My next question is slightly different from what we were talking about so far, but you said in an interview that you are not a nationalist but rather regionalist. What do these identities mean to you?
A.D: My family has been here continuously since 1648 and although I have mixed-race ancestry, I was raised white. To be a nationalist would deny who I am and who my children are with their diverse background including Anglo/Creole-Barbadian, Indo-Trinidadian-Hindu, Irish-Catholic.
Working in the arts as a contemporary practitioner requires that I function regionally because there are small numbers of artists working in each Caribbean country. I choose to actively work across the French, Spanish, Dutch, and English-speaking Caribbean, collaborating with colleagues throughout the archipelago. I would go insane if I only functioned in this small place. My hybrid practice, informed by the history of this place, is concerned with how shared historical suffering reveals itself communally today and the continued impact of the plantation which dominated all aspects of Caribbean life. My cultural activism, writing and sense of who I am is informed by this regional space. So, when I say I am a regionalist I mean our survival hinges on a collective commitment to the growth of an intra-Caribbean space.
I.N: My identity has also a kind similar regional character. It could hardly be different, because me, as member of the Hungarian minority growing up in Czechoslovakia and currently living in Slovakia as the member state of the EU, my situation is also complex. My primary identity is Hungarian, stemming from my family, language and culture. My Slovak identity is connected to the country I live in, its culture and its prosperity I contribute to. And my Czechoslovak identity developed at the time of my childhood and young adulthood, which I spent in the former federation. Since I speak different languages of the region, I have also developed a Central European identity merging different cultural and national identities. I realised that during my first stay in the US in 1998, when, from the distance of several thousand kilometres, I could clearly see that our Central European cultures and history are similar and very closely connected to each other. From that perspective, there were no significant differences, despite having a different approach to the common historical heritage and experience. But it is still a learning process for me and I’m learning it also through researching the history of sugar. My interest in this issue started out from a very local situation, right next to our house, because even now when I take a look through my window, I can still see the empty site of the former sugar factory. So, I started to deal with this topic here, and now I am talking to you based in Barbados, someone who had a rather different starting point, because I think that for you it was from the very beginning a global story, right?
A.D: Absolutely. Barbados’s conscription into the plantation economy began as a global story. 350 years later we no longer offer economic value to Great Britain and need to determine as young nations how to diversify our economies add value to our products. For example, there is no future in bulk sugar, so Barbados is now packaging and exporting consumption sugar to the UK, while Guyana (located in South America but part of the Caribbean) will upgrade their plants to produce white sugar in 2022 meaning we won´t have to spend foreign exchange on importing white sugar. While we began as part of a global narrative, Anglophone Caribbean sugar producers are under pressure to find regional solutions to sustain the sector in spite of high production costs, lack of external markets and little value added to the product [2]. Unless this conservative industry can reinvent the sector to develop quality products or generate alternative power, this historically dominant sector might find itself following the fate of many historical statues around the world today – toppled from their lofty plinths of once influential power.
[1] Botany in the Service of Empire: The Barbados Cane-Breeding Program and the Revival of the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1880s-1930s, J. H. Galloway Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 86, No. 4. (Dec., 1996), pp. 682-706.
Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0004-5608%28199612%2986%3A4%3C682%3ABITSOE%3E2.0.CO%3B2-N Annals of the Association of American Geographers is currently published by Association of American Geographers.
[2] THE VIEW FROM EUROPE: THE LAST CHANCE FOR CARICOM SUGAR? David Jessop, consultant to the Caribbean Council, The Barbados Advocate, 12/08/2019 Accessed on June 12th, 2020.
