High-Priced Coffee

[Craig Clark]

By mistake I posted an early draft of a reply to David Casseres' 
piuece on sugar production to the list yesterday. Here's the full 
reply I wrote:

David Casseres <casseres at apple.com> writes:
 > Awright awright awright.  First, what follows is about Hawaiian cane 
 > sugar, which is most of what you get in the U.S.  (If your sugar comes 
 > from somewhere else it is almost sure to be produced under the most 
 > horrible of neo-colonialist conditions, and soaked so to speak in the 
 > blood of the people who harvested it, so don't use that kind, please.  
 
I lived for fifteen formative years in the coastal town of Umhlanga 
Rocks, just a few klicks north of Durban for you foax with atlases, 
surrounded by sugarcane fields on three sides (with the Indian Ocean 
on the fourth). David's description of sugar-cane production in 
Hawaii sounds familiar. A-and don't forget the huge amounts of 
coastal sub-tropical forest felled to make way for sugarcane! White 
sugarcane capital calls the shots in this part of world, has long 
been cuddling up to Buthelezi's Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom 
Party, etc. Their attempts at promoting rural development and black 
economic empowerment consist for the most part of training subsistence 
farmers to turn their farms over to sugar, a cash crop, which they 
then have to sell to the white capital-owned mills in order to feed 
themselves... A good article, David, thanks a million...

David also asked me for more details on how sugar production takes
place in SA. I'll see what I can round up on this. My own experience
of the sugar industry has been trying to get a handle on the training that 
they offer to the families of sugar estate workers and to small-scale 
subsistence farmers. This training has shifted in emphasis away from 
being exclusively intended to provide people with skills they need to 
work on sugar farms as semi-skilled labour. These days it also embraces 
the skills needed to set oneself up as a small-scale farmer who turns 
a previous subsistence-crop piece of land over to cash-cropping sugar 
which is sold to the big corporate sugar-mills. Which is a really 
good way of ensuring that the costs of reproducing sugarfarm labour 
don't have to be carried by the producers of the sugar that sits on 
our tables... On the corporate sugar estates, unionised labour is unheard
of, and a replication of the tribal social order is used to administer to 
labour, with a well-paid _induna_ acting as the liaison between the 
workers and the bosses. These _izinduna_ are often linked to tribal 
authorities which in turn are linked to the IFP.

More details as I can find 'em!


Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
 the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
 on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"