The trap – and the way out
It was the first ‘consumer’ product. Now it lies behind the very first epidemic diseases of corporate globalization. David Ransom suggests a cure.

Perilous pleasure
What sucrose does to your body.

Sugar daddies
India is the world’s largest producer. As Dionne Bunsha reveals, it hasn’t make a sweet confection.

Hungry ghosts
Anita Ferruzzi examines the troubled relationship between sucrose and eating disorders.

SUGAR – THE FACTS

Sweet nothings in Cancún
Katharine Ainger reports on deadly trade negotiations in Mexico.

Tales from Tagalog
Villagers in the Philippines had their land expropriated by sugar. Now, report Devlin Kuyek and Andrew Skinner, they’re determined to get it back.

Cattail country
The Florida Everglades have been endangered, says Mark Engler, by the power of ‘Big Sugar’ in the United States.

Dirty business
Almaz Mequanint grew up in a sugar-refining town in Ethiopia. Clemens JM Rolink is the General Manager of the Dutch company that built it. They exchange two very different views of the same place.

Slave sugar
How slavery and sucrose grew up together – a brief history.

Refined white
Michael Berry tells the untold story of the South Sea Islanders who built the sugar industry in Australia.

Illustration: Alan Hughes

Personally, I blame rationing. While I was growing up, through the years of post-war austerity, food was scarce in Britain and dispensed rather like medicine: cod-liver oil, concentrated orange juice, milk, malt, porridge, offal, greens, more greens... To buy sweets you needed coupons, and there was no TV. So I grew up pretty healthy – a priceless asset I’ve been squandering ever since.

All the same, I blame rationing for my sweet tooth. Anything that was rationed, like sweets or meat, had mystique. If it wasn’t desirable, why was it rationed? By the time rationing was lifted I’d already acquired my sweet, carnivorous tooth.

Which has little to do with what this magazine was originally supposed to be about. It was conceived as the next in our series on fair trade and ‘commodities’ like bananas, cocoa and coffee. Rather to my astonishment, fair trade has been catching on – in some measure, I feel sure, because NI subscribers have been supporting it.

But sugar, though in many respects quite similar, turned out to be different. It raised awkward questions about how we came to be eating what we do, and where that seems to be taking us. After digesting some of the answers, I couldn’t possibly have concluded that eating refined sugar in any form, fairly traded though it might be, is a sensible thing to do.

Neither did I expect to end up where I started: with my parents’ exasperated plea – ‘EAT YOUR GREENS!’ – ringing in my ears. There, I’ve said it. Now I never, ever, thought to hear myself repeating that.

David Ransom
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
davidr@newint.com.au