Sugar

Ben Richardson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781509501533
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Globalisierung

There is more sugar in the world's diet than ever before, but life is far from sweet for the exploited producers making nature's 'white gold' and the unhealthy consumers eating it.

Why has the billion-dollar sugar trade created such inequities? In this insightful analysis, Ben Richardson argues that the most compelling answers to this question can be found in the dynamics of global capitalism. Led by multinational companies, the mass consumption of sweetened snacks has taken hold in the Global South and underpinned a new wave of foreign investment in sugar production. The expansion of large-scale and highly-industrialised farms across Latin America, Asia and Africa has kept the price of sugar down whilst pushing workers out of jobs and rural dwellers off the land. However, challenges to these practices are gathering momentum. Health advocates warning against costly diseases like diabetes, trade unions fighting for better pay, and local residents campaigning for a cleaner environment are all re-shaping the way sugar is consumed and produced. But to truly transform sugar, Richardson contends, these political activities must also address the profit-driven nature of food and farming itself.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

The global food system has produced a paradox: the world population is simultaneously stuffed and starved. Figures from 2013 show that two billion people are deficient in micronutrients, 868 million have inadequate calorie intake, and 500 million are exposed to diet-related disease because of excessive weight gain.¹ Yet although these manifestations of malnutrition might be embodied in different ways, they are increasingly symptomatic of the same experiences of poverty and discrimination. It is these underlying social inequalities that account for the maldistribution of food and which are perpetuated by the very way in which the food system functions.² This is no accident, of course. For all the harm it has caused, the paradox of food has been good for profits.

A study of sugar has much to tell us about this situation. On the one hand, the way sugar production is organized has denied millions of people the means to buy or grow enough food to feed themselves. The reasons for their poverty differ. Workers have been exploited through low wages or made redundant by mechanization, farmers have been indebted or marginalized in favour of large landowners, and rural dwellers have lost livelihood opportunities or been squeezed off their land. Yet the end result has been the same. Vulnerable people have not received a fair share of the wealth produced by the sugar industry, and, in some cases, have actually been harmed by its more rapacious practices. On the other hand, many of the so-called junk foods that constitute poor-quality diets contain added sugar and other sweeteners. By changing the taste of products and engaging in extensive marketing campaigns, food manufacturers and retailers have been able to transform dietary habits, reorganizing patterns of consumption on a global scale. Average sugar intake more than quadrupled during the twentieth century, with levels of obesity and diabetes following close behind.³

This book seeks to explain these dynamics and explore their injustices. It does so largely with respect to the sweetener made from sugar cane and sugar beet, namely sucrose. While other sweeteners such as high fructose corn syrup can be commonly found in foods and drinks, sucrose remains by far the world’s most popular added sugar. Focusing on cane/beet sugar rather than the entire gamut of dietary sugars is helpful for a number of reasons. Sucrose, especially in its ‘pure’ isolated form as refined sugar, is understood as being qualitatively different from other sugars, such as lactose sugar present in milk. For this reason, when thinking about its effects on health, it is useful to distinguish it from other sources of sweetness.

Centring on a specific commodity also makes it easier to trace it back through the supply chain. This allows us to link questions about consumption to those concerning exchange and production. This is important because, as suggested in the paragraph above, the politics of sugar are to be found in its supply as well as in its demand.

Finally, making the connections between consumption and production also encourages us to take a more global perspective, since many of the supply chains which characterize the contemporary food system operate across national borders. Not only does this perspective give us the bigger picture, it also takes us to parts of the world where sugar is treated very differently and thereby illuminates alternative ways in which the commodity can be understood.

This book, then, is not solely about what we eat but also about how we live. In this sense, though the object of the study is narrow, the question asked is deliberately broad: how are social relations remade through sugar?

It is the relations of inequality perpetuated through the daily practices of individuals consuming, exchanging and producing sugar that we are particularly interested in. One example can be found in oral health since tooth decay is closely linked to sugary foods. Because of differences in diet and dental treatment borne out over a lifetime, the poorest people in England end up with five fewer teeth than the richest.⁴ The imprint of sugar upon people’s mouths can thus be read as both a manifestation and a marker of their social status.

Such inequalities are not solely down to differences in class. Hierarchies based on gender, age, race, ethnicity, caste and nationality are equally important and frequently intersect at the individual level. For instance, because of the different ways their work is valued, the female worker cultivating sugar cane in India earns much less than her male counterpart sowing sugar beet in Germany. It is the ambition of this book to chart these intersecting inequalities and introduce to the reader the fate of those people purposely distanced from the seductive world of sweetness and light portrayed in industry marketing materials. This is the bitter side of sugar, and one worth knowing.

The global politics of sugar: the limits of existing approaches

Existing studies of sugar typically fall into one of two camps. The first camp deals with the poverty-inducing effects of sugar and tends to frame it as an issue of international trade. This results from the curious situation whereby exactly the same product, refined sugar or pure sucrose, can be made from two entirely different crops. These are the grass-crop sugar cane which is grown in tropical climates and the root-crop sugar beet which is grown in temperate climates. The near-universal ability to grow sugar crops has thus allowed governments across the world to build up a domestic sugar industry by protecting markets from imports and supporting producers with favourable prices.

The legacies of this are extensive. There are an estimated 1.1 million jobs in sugar manufacturing and tens of millions more in sugar farming scattered across more than 120 countries.⁵ By contrast, coffee production takes place in sixty countries and cocoa production in just thirty. Furthermore, sugar is considered by the World Bank to be the second most protected agricultural commodity in the world behind rice. In 2008, the level of import tariffs and domestic subsidies on sugar accounted for almost one-fifth of all agricultural support – that amounts to a lot of redistributive tax.⁶ The injustice that both free traders and development campaigners have pointed out is that protectionist policies have largely benefited sugar-beet producers in developed countries. They argue that, by keeping out sugar-cane exports from developing countries, trade barriers have denied poor people the chance to trade their way out of poverty and thus confined them to a life of hunger. Or as the Wall Street Journal once pithily put it: ‘Addiction to sugar subsidies chokes poor nations’ exports.’⁷

While trade protection remains important in shaping who benefits from sugar production, the idea that the industry is controlled by wealthy farmers in Europe and the United States of America is increasingly untenable. First, significant steps towards liberalization have happened over the last two decades, turning the European Union into a net sugar importer for the first time since the 1970s and opening up the United States to unlimited imports from Mexico. In fact, the United States is consistently one of the world’s biggest importers of sugar.

Figure 1.1 Global production of sugar cane and sugar beet, 1961–2013

Source: FAOSTAT

Second, most of the extra demand for sugar crops has come from Asia, Africa and Latin America – not just to make sugar but biofuel too – meaning that production has increased most rapidly in these regions. This is made clear in Figure 1.1. In 1961, just over a quarter of the total sugar crop harvest was made up of sugar beet, but, by 2013, this had fallen to less than one-eighth. The majority of the world’s sugar that year was produced by Brazil, India, China and Thailand, the powerhouses of the global sugar economy.

The third problem with the trade protectionism argument is an analytical one. A major weakness of many studies of the international sugar trade is the way they have treated countries as homogeneous units rather than hierarchical societies. Since there is significant inequality within countries as well as between them, focusing on which country sugar is produced in only gives us part of the picture.

There are many examples of non-farming men (and they are usually men) in developing countries who have become fantastically wealthy through sugar while their fellow citizens languish in poverty. Two of the richest people in the world in fact built their business empires on the back of sugar-trading enterprises: the Nigerian Aliko Dangote, now worth an estimated US$25 billion and the Malaysian Robert Kuok worth US$12 billion. Others have found their fortunes as industrialists. The Brazilian Rubens Ometto Silveria Mello, worth US$2 billion, made his money at the helm of a sugar-cane milling company and was dubbed by Forbes ‘the world’s first ethanol billionaire’.

And nor is it just among the elites of Africa, Asia and Latin America that colossal sugar fortunes can be found. There are the Fanjul brothers who own Florida Crystals Corporation and American Sugar Refining, the Weston family which owns AB Sugar and its parent company Associated British Foods, and the Russian Vadim Moshkovich who owns Russia’s biggest sugar and agricultural holding company Rusagro. And beyond those businesses selling sugar as an ingredient, there are those reselling it in the form of manufactured foods and drinks. These include western-based multinational corporations like Coca-Cola, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, Mars, Mondelez, Nestlé, PepsiCo and Unilever. Together, these companies made over US$50 billion profit in 2013 – a handsome return for their shareholders.⁸ These individual and organizational examples of wealth accumulation all belie the idea that we can determine who benefits from sugar simply by looking at national levels of output and export.

The other camp of sugar studies is concerned with its adverse health effects. If the injustices of sugar production have been framed as a problem of trade protectionism, t...