Sugar Industry Books Pdf

[Francisco Raya]

Althoughlittle remains of Hawaii's plantation economy, the sugar industry's past dominance has created the Hawaiʻi we see today. Many of the most pressing and controversial issues--urban and resort development, water rights, expansion of suburbs into agriculturally rich lands, pollution from herbicides, invasive species in native forests, an unsustainable economy--can be tied to Hawaiʻi's industrial sugar history.

Sovereign Sugar unravels the tangled relationship between the sugar industry and Hawaii's cultural and natural landscapes. It is the first work to fully examine the complex tapestry of socioeconomic, political, and environmental forces that shaped sugar's role in Hawaiʻi. While early Polynesian and European influences on island ecosystems started the process of biological change, plantation agriculture, with its voracious need for land and water, profoundly altered Hawaii's landscape.

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About the ProjectThe International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank, recognized the need for a comprehensive guide to Good Management Practices for the Cane Sugar Industry. To meet this need, IFC assembled a team of authors, who have developed, managed and rehabilitated new and existing sugarcane projects in many parts of Africa. The authors bring a wide range of skills to the project, with their experience in sugarcane agriculture, environment, processing, social and economic fields.

The book is authored by eminent South African sugar technologists who also have extensive international experience and contacts that allowed the underlying principles of good management practice to be supported by South African and international examples. The principle authors are supported by experienced colleagues across agronomic, factory and social issues that impact the sugar industry. Reliance primarily on South African authors was a condition of funding from the pool of funds available from the International Finance Corporation for the project.

Good or best management practice? Best management practices are often site-specific so the book provides the reader with a grounding the principles associated with good management, so that inputs can be adjusted and timed to provide best outcomes for a given environment.

Dr Kingston is an agronomic consultant to the Australian and International Sugar Industries. He retired from BSES Limited in 2011 after a 42 year career as a research and extension agronomist with the Australian Sugar Industry. He has experience of most international sugarcane production systems and has consulted in Australia, South Africa, Tanzania, Florida, Hawaii, Colombia, Ecuador, Pakistan and Papua New Guinea and has contributed to evaluation of projects in Sudan and Indonesia.

"There is a tremendous renewal of interest in everything Cuban these days. Florida is lucky to have such impressive research materials and, increasingly, important new books that bring history to life." - Miami Herald

--Miami Herald

" Superbly intertwines the biography of a family with the interlocking histories of both Cuba and the US. In elegant prose" ; " This is a major contribution to US as well as Cuban history".

--Choice

"McAvoy's history is a well-told narrative of people and finances . . . It also provides us with a very complex portrait of Cuba, the United States, and the world of sugar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

--Enterprise & Society

"McAvoy's excellent work provides a fascinating portrait of a dynamic entrepreneur whose experiences illuminate the evolving international sugar industry and the Cuban-U.S. economic relations before the Revolution."

--New West Indian Guide

" McAvoy challenges the view that U.S. capitalism reduced Cuba's businessmen to helpless pawns. She provides a clearer view of the responsibility for events between the Spanish-Ameican War and the triumph of Castro's revolution."

--The Forest(Wire Story)

Early in the twentieth century, the Cuban sugarcane industry faced a labor crisis when Cuban and European workers balked at the inhumane conditions they endured in the cane fields. Rather than reforming their practices, sugar companies gained permission from the Cuban government to import thousands of black workers from other Caribbean colonies, primarily Haiti and Jamaica. Black Labor, White Sugar illuminates the story of these immigrants, their exploitation by the sugarcane companies, and the strategies they used to fight back.

Philip A. Howard traces the socioeconomic and political circumstances in Haiti and Jamaica that led men to leave their homelands to cut, load, and haul sugarcane in Cuba. Once there, the field workers, or braceros, were subject to marginalization and even violence from the sugar companies, which used structures of race, ethnicity, color, and class to subjugate these laborers. Howard argues that braceros drew on their cultural identities-from concepts of home and family to spiritual worldviews-to interpret and contest their experiences in Cuba. They also fought against their exploitation in more overt ways. As labor conditions worsened in response to falling sugar prices, the principles of anarcho-syndicalism converged with the Pan-African philosophy of Marcus Garvey to foster the evolution of a protest culture among black Caribbean laborers. By the mid-1920s, this identity encouraged many braceros to participate in strikes that sought to improve wages as well as living and working conditions.

The first full-length exploration of Haitian and Jamaican workers in the Cuban sugarcane industry, Black Labor, White Sugar examines the industry's abuse of thousands of black Caribbean immigrants, and the braceros' answering struggle for power and self-definition.

Philip A. Howard is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean history at the University of Houston. He is the author of Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century.

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"History at its best - crafted to link commodity and migration history, documenting networks of merchants, manufacturers, and skilled workers and how their mobility and knowledge transfer catapulted nineteenth-century Cuba to the pinnacle of global sugar production and trade, regaling us with a window onto the forgotten lives of itinerant maquinistas following the routes of British steam-driven technology, a world in which they enjoyed the privileges of a foreign white enclave in a slave plantation economy yet were also social outsiders, both catalysts and scapegoats when the contradictions of Spanish colonial slave society in an epoch of British abolitionism, erupted in the 1844 Ladder Conspiracy. A veritable tour de force in global labour history." - Jean Stubbs, Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London

"Jonathan Curry-Machado's social history of the engineers and mechanics that immigrated from northern Europe and North America to Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth century provides an original perspective on the industrialization of world cane sugar production and Cuba's pioneering position in it. Curry-Machado carefully reconstructs the role of these foreign technicians in the transformation of the Cuban sugar industry, and effectively situates their experience within the tensions deriving from the relations between global networks and local conditions, technological change in a slave economy, and foreign identity in a colonial society. This book will be of interest to specialists and general readers alike." - Dale Tomich, Binghamton University

Pre-1778: Around 600 A.D., the first settlers in Hawaiʻi brought to the islands several varieties of sugarcane. The Native Hawaiians cultivated sugarcane, or kō in Hawaiian, and ate it as food and medicine. The Native Hawaiians chewed the cane stalk for its sweet juices and to maintain their teeth and gums. The juices from the sugarcane sweetened puddings made of taro, sweet potatoes, breadfruit, and bananas. Other parts of sugarcane plant were used, including the leaves for thatching, the flower stalks for game darts, and the charcoal for dying. Before European contact, the Native Hawaiians never produced sugar.

1778: European explorer Captain James Cook recorded in his journal, "We saw...a few trees about the villages; near which...we could observe several plantations of plantains and sugar-canes." With sugarcane, Captain Cook made beer, which his sailors reportedly did not enjoy.

1848: The "Great Mahele" (a land distribution act) allowed foreigners to own land in Hawaiʻi for the first time. As large amounts of land are needed for the mass cultivation of sugar, the "Great Mahele" contributed to the growth of the sugar industry in Hawaiʻi.

June 21, 1850: The Masters and Servants Act was enacted. This new law legalized apprenticeships, indentured service, the contract-labor system, and the large importation of workers from other countries. Under this law, a laborer who has absenteeism issues or leaves a position before the end of the contract could be captured by "coercive force" by employers and face strict punishments. Punishments included working extra hours beyond the amount of time specified in the work contract (usually twice the original contract period) and being sentenced to prison to do hard labor there. Because of this law, workers could not organize labor unions or go on strike.

1852: Workers start immigrating from other countries to work in the plantations, starting with the Chinese. On January 3, 1852; 175 Chinese workers arrived on the ship Thetis. Eventually, other ethnic groups will come to Hawaiʻi to work in the plantations, including the Portuguese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Spaniards, Russians, and Norwegians. This situation of extreme globalization resulted in the multiculturalism of Hawaiʻi and the Hawaiʻi Creole English, commonly referred as "Pidgin," which developed during Hawaiʻi's plantation days and is now spoken by more than half of the residents in Hawaiʻi.

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