15 - Sugar

Sugar, like coffee, is another food Canadians take for granted and expect to have at “reasonable prices.” Unlike coffee, sugar can be produced in Canada, but the Canadian sugar beet industry accounts for only about 10% of the sugar processed in this country. 90% of the sugar we use comes from sugar cane which originates in Southern countries. At one time, for example, sugar was the primary export product of the Dominican Republic. And for much of the 20th century, the history of the Dominican Republic was dominated by the country’s sugar industry. The sugar we purchased in my childhood home in Indiana was marketed under the label “Dominicana.”

Sugar cane production was central to the economic development of many Caribbean nations until the 19th century, when European sugar beet farmers were able to produce a less expensive product. During the First World War, however, the sugar beet industry in Europe was ruined, and sugar cane once more became one of the world’s most lucrative crops. Large areas of the Dominican Republic were turned over to sugar production at that time. But cutting cane is hard and dangerous work, and the wages are notoriously low, so few Dominicans were willing to work in the cane fields. Therefore another source of labour had to be found, and it came from the neighbouring country of Haiti.

The political and economic situation in Haiti has been dire for so long that thousands of Haitians annually enter the Dominican Republic illegally seeking to improve their living conditions, just as Dominicans seek to improve their lives by emigrating to Puerto Rico. Some of these Haitians sought work in the Dominican cane fields, but still others were forced to harvest sugar cane. Because of the language and racial differences between the two nations, Haitians are easily identified. And as recently as the end of the 20th century, some of the illegal migrants caught by Dominican authorities were forced to work in state owned cane fields.

For both those who sought labour in the Dominican cane fields, as well as those forced into that labour, the conditions in which they worked approached those of slavery. Armed guards prevented workers from attempting to escape. The Haitian migrants were housed in camps called bateys without access to secure water sources, electricity, schools or medical facilities. Only pit latrines were available for sanitation. Sugar is no longer a particularly important part of the Dominican economy; but the bateys still exist, and almost all of the sugar produced in the Dominican Republic today is harvested by the Haitians who live in them.

When I was first working with the YMCA of the Dominican Republic in the 1980s and 90s, the situation was far more extreme than it is today. The work day was commonly twelve hours long, and children, cutting cane with machetes, routinely worked alongside their parents. It was piece work; workers were not paid an hourly wage. The rate was approximately $3 [US] per ton. A veteran cane cutter could harvest about 1.5 tons a day. Even adults rarely earned more than $5 [US] a day. And instead of being given cash for their work, cutters were often paid in vouchers which could only be redeemed for cash every two weeks. Labourers who could not afford to wait the two weeks to redeem these vouchers exchanged them for goods at company stores in the bateys for less than their face value. Further, out of these meagre earnings, workers had to pay their expenses–which included purchasing their own gear as well paying the transportation costs to have the cane picked up by trucks and taken to weighing stations.

That was part of the hidden cost of sugar that my family in Indiana was never aware of.