SUGAR

Sugar production is one of the Brazilian industries which have waxed, waned, and with the encouragement of high market prices abroad, has recently again forged ahead. As in the case of cotton, sugar can be and is grown in the great majority of Brazilian states, from the mouth of the Amazon down to the Laguna Mirim, but there are areas, chiefly on the central littoral, where soil and climate are so well suited to sugarcane that production from these regions is able to compete with other world offerings. There was a time when Brazil was the chief source of sugar supplies to Europe, but the industry suffered two great blows—one, the stimulation of cane-growing in the British West Indies, and again the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888, which resulted in many instances in the abandonment of the plantations by a large part of the negro population, crowding into the coast cities to enjoy new liberty.

Cane production has all the advantages of an ancient industry whose details have long been reduced to an exact science. Its recorded history goes back to the fifth century, so that we can reckon that there have been fourteen centuries of experiment in cane culture. A native of Bengal, sugar was in cultivation in the fifth century along the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates; the conquering Moors took it into Spain in the eighth century, and during the following six or seven centuries its cultivation on a limited scale proceeded on the shores of the Mediterranean. In the fifteenth century when Portugal re-found and colonized Madeira and the Azores, sugarcane was introduced into these islands, flourished there, and yielded sugar to the home market in Lisbon. That it was an exotic luxury in Europe generally is proved by its price: a hundredweight sold in London in 1842 fetched £55. Twenty-five years later the price had dropped to ten pounds for a like quantity, but by that time larger supplies were coming in. After the discovery of the West Indian Islands by Columbus cane was introduced into Hispaniola and Cuba by the Spanish settlers, but cultivation was strongly discouraged by the home government, who chiefly aimed at the stimulation of gold-mining. Brazil, whose gold-deposits were luckily not discovered until the seventeenth century, became in contrast to New Spain an agricultural country from the time when the first capitanias were allotted: she began shipping sugar in the visiting Portuguese caravels in a few years after first settlement.

Thenceforth for over a century and a quarter Brazil became the main source of sugar supplies to Europe; when placer gold and diamond-bearing gravels were found by the bandeirantes everyone rushed to the General Mines taking slaves along, until the coast plantations were denuded both of masters and labourers. Consequent languishing of sugar production made it worth while for both England and France to develop cane growing in the West Indian isles which they had seized from Spain. It was in 1662 that the British “Company of Royal Adventurers of Africa” agreed to deliver three thousand slaves a year to the British West Indies, and sugar production in Jamaica, Barbados, etc., began to attract wealthy planters: whole fleets of high-prowed sailing ships came into Caribbean waters to take away sugar, rum and molasses in those palmy days, enduring until Napoleon started the beet-sugar industry and Great Britain, not long after, abolished the slave trade.

Europe only discovered her possession of a sweet tooth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the great production of sugar from the New World began to be carried to Spain and Portugal, and by them distributed at high prices and in small quantities to the rest of Europe, the only sweetening known to the masses of the population was honey, and this was a luxury. There was no taste for sweets until sweets became common. The real taste of the Middle Ages was for spices; it is not generally realized today to what extent the food of Europe was at this period saturated with cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and other spices brought from the Orient. It was for the “Spice Isles” that the early navigators searched the wide seas, spices that they ate with a gusto almost incomprehensible today: they flavoured their beverages and scented their clothes with spices.

The most flourishing centres of sugar production in Brazil are in the State of Rio de Janeiro, where Campos is the focus of sugar deliveries, and Pernambuco, a thousand miles farther north; São Paulo has also an increasing sugar industry, as may be seen from the following list of large sugar mills; small factories, of which there are hundreds in Brazil chiefly turning out rapadura, a brown sugar-brick, and cachaça, the native rum, are not included:—

Alagôas9
Bahia7
Maranhão3
Minas Geraes7
Parahyba do Norte2
Pernambuco46
Rio de Janeiro31
Santa Catharina2
São Paulo20
Sergipe15
Piauhy1
Rio Grande do Norte3
139

On almost every cotton, coffee, tobacco or other fazenda in Brazil, besides those given over to sugar production, one finds patches of the bright veridian green that demonstrates the presence of sugar, grown and milled for home uses; altogether the production of sugar in Brazil must be much larger than is shown by any statistics, and there does not exist any comprehensive estimate of the total amount. A few years ago the charge could be made that Brazilian sugar-milling methods were antiquated, extraction low because the machinery employed was inferior: but whoever repeats this tale today has not seen any of the huge, scientifically managed estates and mills of Pernambuco, the usinas of the country about Campos, where the sky-line is punctuated by slim chimneys, or any of the fine modern equipments of São Paulo. One of the first good mills that the writer saw in Brazil was at Piracicaba, in the interior of São Paulo, where an excellent product was marketed by the employment of thoroughly up-to-date methods. Here the installation of machinery is European, chiefly French, but there has been an increasing tendency since the outbreak of war in Europe towards purchases of American equipment, perhaps especially among the usinas of the northern promontory.

Exports of sugar from Brazil have fluctuated in an extraordinary manner since the beginning of this century; swift drops in amounts sent abroad have nearly always spelt “drought,” but there seems to have been a general tendency to decline until the stimulation of war prices helped the industry, due partly to formidable competition from the Caribbean islands and coasts, and partly to increased consumption in Brazil. A marked feature of the Brazilian sugar export lists is a developing sale to Argentina; it has been recently stimulated by the failure of Argentine supplies, but is also part of the symptomatic increase of interchange between the commercial South American countries. Brazilian sugar exports, shipped in bags of sixty kilos weight, 1906 to 1920 in round numbers:—

190685,000tons
190713,000„
190832,000„
190968,000„
191059,000„
191136,000„
19124,800„
19135,400„
191432,000„
191559,000„
191654,000,000„
1917138,000,000„
1918116,000,000„
191969,000,000„
1920109,000,000„

The price has ranged during this period from two hundred and twenty-five reis per kilo paid for the short crop of 1904, down to one hundred and eight reis paid in 1906 when the crop was large; from that low point it climbed upwards, fluctuating about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty reis from 1907 to 1913, fixed exchange making this price the equivalent of about three and a half to four cents a kilo, or something like a cent and a quarter to a cent and three-quarters per pound. In 1914, with war prices encouraging the sugar market, the price rose to two hundred and twelve reis a kilo, and in 1915 to two hundred and forty-four reis, a figure exceeded enormously in the post-war boom of 1919–20.

The average yield of sugarcane per hectare in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo is fifty tons, or let us say something over twenty tons an acre; this does not compare with Caribbean coast yields, where eighty or ninety tons an acre is obtained from lands impregnated with volcanic ash, and fields are to be seen which have not been re-planted for a dozen years. Brazilian soils, chiefly composed of drifts of disintegrated granite, oxidized by the sun to a brilliant red tint, are sometimes very rich, but also are frequently just good honest soils that cannot stand abuse without exhaustion following; with proper rotation of crops these lands will yield generously, but it is scarcely surprising that, in regions where sugar has been almost continuously cultivated for a couple of centuries, the cane crop per acre is comparatively low.

Pernambuco, for instance, counts her cane cultivation from the year 1534, when the first engenho (sugar mill), piously named Nossa Senhora de Ajuda, was established near the settlement at Olinda.

Brazilians are large consumers of sugar; the internal consumption has been calculated at three hundred thousand tons a year, or some eighty to ninety pounds a head of the population, and, with the exception of fine sweets imported, chiefly from France, all of the sugar used in Brazil is nationally produced. The sugar growing and refining industry is in an exceedingly healthy condition, is one of the important national resources, and has shown marked revival during the last two years.

Carioca Cotton Mill, Rio de Janeiro.
Catende Sugar Mill, Pernambuco.