Traveling with Sugar. Amy Moran-Thomas

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СКАЧАТЬ cultural structures of the society to which it once was joined.”³²

      The old pipe jutting over the river at Libertad looked like an oil pipeline, but it was built for molasses. For a brief time after 1989, a Jamaican company called PetroJam leased the old sugar estate and used its molasses to refine into ethanol for U.S. markets. But by the time I visited, only sugarcane was being loaded into the tugboats I watched preparing for export. Staring into the water that some call “the river of strange faces,” I thought of Kara Walker’s art installation in the old Dominos Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, where pools of dissolved sugar water reflected each visitor back at themselves. Now that sweet crude oil has been drilled in Belize, there are jokes that even the land has gotten sweet blood.³³

      WELCOME TO LIBERTAD read a sign at the edge of town. Welcome to Liberty. If you follow that road going north, a crumbled sugar distillery from the 1700s sprouts vines, a reminder of when Bacardi owned those fields and the ensnared cane workers were mostly Yucatec Maya men. Or go south, where remnants around the British brick sugar mill at Indian Church tell a story of robust Indigenous agriculture until the time of colonial contact, when Maya land use and diets became violently constricted and malnutrition skyrocketed.³⁴

      In another direction lies the sugar village of Calcutta. It was founded by East Indians branded “Sepoy mutineers” by the British and deported to Belize for participating in India’s First War of Independence in 1858,³⁵ “sent to sugar estates in the north.”³⁶ Or cut closer along the border, where the cane fields are transected by what people call “the sugar road.” A signboard from Hershey marks the sugarcane’s eventual destination for processing in Pennsylvania. Animal blood is no longer used to clarify industrial sugar, but charred cow bones are still a medium in the process many companies use to whiten sugarcane.³⁷ Before long, some of this refined sugar will return again to Caribbean and Latin American markets as sweet packaged food products, part of the global circuits of production and consumption that Frantz Fanon long ago foresaw as the next stage of exploitation: “The colonies have become a market. The colonial population is a customer who is ready to buy goods,” which Fanon viewed as part and parcel of “that violence which is just under the skin.”³⁸

      Colonial sugar economies were driven by “unequal ecological exchange,” Jason Moore noted, not only human labor extraction.³⁹ Sometimes I tried to picture what the old forest in Stann Creek District looked like before it was logged and later burned to clear fields for plantations. Inhabiting a hobbled landscape, some interviewees told me they wanted to grow vegetables, but the soil along highway was too poor to grow anything but oranges and bananas. Was it always? This legacy was not only about land in law, but also about its biology. Once cane grows in certain ground, it depletes nutrients from the soil. This paves the way for further industrial monocropping, since it often leaves behind exhausted land that requires heavy doses of petrochemical pesticides and fertilizers in order to grow.

      I didn’t used to know the names of the chemicals they put on sugar in Belize, but I tasted them once. Biting to peel a cane stalk straight from the fields with my teeth, the white powder flaked dry on my tongue and dissolved without flavor. Later, a friend and I stood staring at the names of the agricultural chemicals advertised on a sign in town: Actara, Amistar, Cruiser, Curyam, Flex, Gesaprim, Gramoxone, Karate, Ridomil Gold, Syngenta. Somehow, the advertised list felt taboo to discuss: the shopkeeper did not want to talk about which ones he sold for sugar and which ones for other monocrops, like oranges and bananas. The term pesticide drift that I read about sounded like a sinister enigma. But lab tests in Belize measure it: glyphosate, better known by the brand name Roundup, was found in six out of six test sites in Stann Creek.⁴⁰

      “In 2002–2007, the sugar industry alone produced 5,074,261 to 5,950,123 gallons of liquid waste per year,” the Belize Ministry of Health noted. Recent orange and banana blights had further driven the use of pesticides, the report added: “Wash waters and irrigation run-offs contaminate the watershed in the two southernmost districts—Stann Creek and Toledo . . . where runoff and chemical pollution affect adjacent water bodies.”⁴¹ Pesticides found in a Stann Creek water sample included cadusafos, ethoprop, acetochlor, fenamiphos, oxamyl, carbofuran, chlorpyrifos, dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, chlorothalonil, trifluralin, malathion, lead, and mercury levels that peaked where the Stann Creek river meets the sea.⁴²

      “They don’t talk about it, but I think our diabetes is also caused by all the chemicals,” Sarah’s sister-in-law told me. Publications supporting her suspicion indeed existed in the literature—many chemicals are endocrine disruptors, which population-level studies report lead to a heightened risk of diabetes and weight gain.⁴³ But proof was not possible to demonstrate causality for her case of diabetes in particular, which is of course the point about not being able to tell where sugar begins or ends. An abundance of population studies elsewhere suggests that the growth in both type 1 and type 2 diabetes is exacerbated by exposure to pesticide runoff from agricultural and other synthetic chemicals and pollution in food, air, and waterways. The haze of what Vanessa Agard-Jones calls “accreted violence”⁴⁴ from agricultural pesticides remains a legacy throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. In this context of limited foods and abundant chemicals, Sarah’s name for her glucose meter, “sugar machine,” struck me as an apt frame for the way this region—if not much of the agro-industrial world system—is fast becoming a “diabetes machine.”

      CHRONIC LANDSCAPES

      “I dug that driveway,” Theo told me as we drove down a road that cut through plantations. We were headed in the direction of Sarah’s village from some fifty miles north. Theo hit the brakes to slow down at the rusty bridge, craning to check for anything coming from the other direction. He said the bridge was so narrow because it was not actually designed for people or cars. It had been built as a railroad trestle for United Fruit’s old banana train. That was why the two-lane highway contracted there and only one car could squeeze through at a time. The traces were hard to detect; United Fruit and their rail lines were long gone by then. There are new companies on the old plantations today, but the most radical change imaginable for this land now is a switch from bananas to other fruit.

      I loved driving between Belmopan and Dangriga through the Maya Mountains with Theo because he knew things like that. I gathered between the lines of his stories that Theo, charismatic even as an old man, had been a heartbreaker in his younger years. He knew every village. Itinerant driving was his favorite line of work now, he said, but over the years he had also worked picking oranges, walked survey through Belize’s forests, sung country ballads, traveled abroad, done odd jobs of all kinds, and traded fish when there still used to be a lot of fish in the sea. He described the days when there didn’t used to be any bars but each house distilled its own liquor from rice or pineapples that was crystal clear. He showed me the neem tree with leaves that he boiled sometimes to help manage his blood sugar.

      “I see children nine, ten years old dying of diabetes,” Theo said as he shook his head, eyes on the road. He had diabetes, too, as did most of his friends. They were learning from each other’s misfortunes. Theo told me how one of his toughest friends had been found mysteriously dead in a hallway at home. The death looked so odd, with the house suggesting signs of struggle, that the police ran tests to see if he had been murdered. But they could find no signs of foul play. Theo thought that probably his friend had woken up realizing he had low blood sugar (more immediately dangerous than high blood sugar) and had fought to crawl his way to the kitchen. He almost made it. Since then, Theo always kept a few pieces of hard candy in his pocket and in the car, to eat along the road and make sure he didn’t pass out while driving.

      Theo stopped at a curve in the mountains and bought two chicken tamales, handing me one. We stopped at a gas station to unfold the banana leaves coated in ash. Most people in Belize speak English, but it is filled with phrases you do not hear anywhere else. In Theo’s words for the highway, the low traffic reflectors edging the forest were “cat eyes” and the speed bumps were “sleeping police.” СКАЧАТЬ