The Price of Sugar

I was in Boston this past weekend and jumped at the chance to see The Price of Sugar, since it will be showing in Champaign-Urbana probably never. It is a documentary about sugar cane workers in the Dominican Republic that I had heard about on NPR. It was certainly a sober counterweight to our recent Halloween excesses. I came away thinking that perhaps I should never use sugar again, or anything that contains sugar, or anything that might bring me joy, if even for a moment. When I mentioned this to my wife on the phone, her only comment was that she would try to make sure our sugar supply was gone by the time I got home.

The story is actually as much about immigration as slave-like working conditions. Dominicans apparently hate Haitians, since they are poorer and darker, and one of the few groups that Dominicans can look down on. Haitians are willing to work for a lot less, so sugar plantation owners illegally bus them across the border and into the plantations. The plantations provide squalid living conditions under the constant threat of violence and don’t even provide enough food for the workers to eat. If the Haitians manage to leave the plantation, the Dominicans arrest them for being illegals. When a local priest succeeds in raising the Haitians’ standard of living a little, the Dominicans hold protests that the Haitians are stealing their jobs. It all seemed so depressingly familiar, but with much worse conditions and more nastiness.

I know this is incredibly naive of me, but I just don’t understand why it has to be this way. It can’t take that much money to provide workers with basic housing and food. I doubt the sugar plantation would lose any competitive advantage in treating their workers humanely, rather than as medieval serfs. What possible rationalization justifies the added wealth brought about by the complete dehumanization of workers? That’s one area where the documentary disappoints, because it only shows the workers being abused, and not the bigger picture of why. If it is simply that plantation owners are evil, then I want to see them sniveling and rubbing their hands greedily into the camera.

So, my question of “why are people bad?” must remain open for now. And sadly, I’m not really going to stop using sugar. It is hard to resist something so ubiquitous that also tastes so good. The problem isn't the sugar itself, but that our entire economic system is designed to produce low prices, rather than fair and just working conditions for workers. The best thing I can do is buy fair trade sugar, chocolate and coffee, which only takes more work and money on my part. More work and less money for me doesn’t sound so bad compared to what sugar cane workers have to endure to provide a steady supply of cheap sugar to the world.