Re-naturalizing sugar: narratives of place, production and ...

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66 Gail M. Hollander ing a public opinion survey, developing publications and promotional materials—and longterm strategies, most importantly the development of mass educational activities, such as teachers’ manuals and teaching materials, speaking tours, educational recordings, radio programming and motion pictures. A key strategy of the Foundation was the establishment of sugar research awards, administered by the National Science Fund of the National Academy of the Sciences. Publicity regarding the competition and the announcement of awards served to cast the relationship between science and sugar in a positive light. Recipients included academics from paediatrics, chemistry, physiology, dentistry and bacteriology, researching topics such as sucrose chemistry, metabolic rates, vitamin uptake and food processing. Gala awards banquets were held, to impress the home economics and nutrition editors of widely read magazines and newspapers with the scientific import given to the study of sugar. Florida sugar and the propaganda of production Although the Sugar Research Foundation sought to unite divergent interests, one faction of US sugar producers—a relative newcomer to the industry—did not participate in this campaign for consumption. Prior to and during the Second World War, the Florida industry waged a separate lobbying campaign. At that time, one company—United States Sugar Corporation (USSC)—was responsible for 96 per cent of Florida’s output, so corporate and geographic interests closely corresponded. Because they were based on historical levels of output, New Deal production quotas were especially restrictive to the Florida industry. Incorporated in 1931, USSC was slowly expanding, within the limits set by seed cane propagation, when the Jones-Costigan Act was passed. USSC executives sought increased quota allotments by waging a propaganda campaign that emphasized regional comparisons. In contrast to the Sugar Research Foundation campaign that avoided ‘sectional problems’, USSC’s propaganda highlighted geographic differences in labour and technology for political purposes. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, USSC published a series of illustrated booklets contrasting the Florida industry with other sugarproducing regions. The booklets, intended for wide distribution to sugar consumers, were an elaborate form of liberation marketing. Some Notes on Offshore Conditions criticized the industries of Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico for low wages and ‘deplorable living conditions’ (USSC 1937) and faulted the Hawaiian industry for labour shortages. Other mainland producers were not spared. Photographic illustrations contrasted horse-drawn ploughing in Louisiana with ‘Cultivating Sugar-Cane with 3-Row Disc Cultivators, The Everglades, Florida’. Florida Sugar promoted USSC’s attempt ‘to bring to agriculture the viewpoint and technique that has placed the American industrialist so far ahead’ (USSC 1936). A section entitled ‘Our Men Wear Shoes’ favourably compared the standard of living of Florida and offshore cane workers. Subsequent booklets elaborated this theme, with charts comparing ownership of consumer items by Florida and offshore workers. The Fruit of the Cane detailed the spatial organization of USSC, with eleven plantation villages ‘strategically located throughout the property to keep the employees close to the center of their activities’ (USSC 1940: 10). In these booklets, corporate paternalism blended with a neoplantation ideology to reinforce the overarching theme: that the Florida industry was the most agroindustrially
progressive among US sourcing regions, deserving of a greater share of the US market. In July 1960 President Dwight Eisenhower ‘temporarily’ suspended Cuba’s sugar quota and lifted the restrictions on domestic producers. Sugar capitalists, invested in Cuba, were attracted to Florida by its latent potential for development and its access to the US sugar market. Within five years, the Florida industry was transformed. To the existing two mills in the area, eight new mills were added and cane acreage increased five-fold. Some of the new investors, such as Alfonso Fanjul, were backed by the sugar brokerage firm, Czarnikow-Rionda, which also supplied capital to a group of Florida farmers for a co-operative sugar company. Noting that the price paid by one group of Cubans for 16,000 acres of ‘virgin swampy land’ in Florida was three times what the USA had paid Spain for the entire state, a Spanish-language Miami paper declared that ‘the state of Florida should give thanks to Fidel Castro for its internal sugarbowl expansion’ (Avance 1961, author’s translation). Supermarket narratives, liberation marketing When production quotas were reinstated in 1965 the Florida industry was again concerned with its public image. By then the industry’s use of offshore workers for harvest was under scrutiny and executives identified labour as their ‘Achilles heel’. During the 1980s, as the Florida industry continued to import 10,000 workers annually for the harvest season, public attention focused on cane-cutters’ living and working conditions. At the same time, the industry came under increasing criticism for polluting the Everglades. By 1991 Florida Trend reported ‘the industry Re-naturalizing sugar 67 is under siege like never before … The 1990s will be the sugar industry’s decade of reckoning’ (Resnick 1991: 41). Arrayed against ‘Big Sugar’ were industrial sweetener users, consumer groups, labour advocates, foreign governments, environmentalists and government officials. As the politics of sugar sourcing and Everglades restoration merged, environmental organizations and major sweetener users formed The Coalition to End Welfare to Big Sugar. Hershey, Coca-Cola, the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society joined forces, though their agendas differed. Sweetener users wanted to purchase sugar at world market prices, whereas environmental organizations sought to downsize the Florida industry. Prior to the 1995 Farm Bill the Coalition published The Bittersweet Times, headlined ‘Aliens Earn Millions in Gov’t Bonanza’ referring to the Fanjul family, which owns the largest sugar company in Florida, Flo-Sun. Opponents portrayed the Florida industry as greedy, foreign, un-American, big business—run by and for ‘Sugar Barons’. The Florida sugar industry provides 20 per cent of the US sugar supply; of that, approximately 75 per cent is produced by the two largest companies, USSC and Flo-Sun. Under attack, they chose disparate public relations and marketing strategies. USSC emphasized community, family, farming and nation so as to counter the image of ‘sugar barons’ (Sanchez 1995). Their website, titled ‘An integrated family of agribusiness companies’, stressed two themes: the industrial aspects of sugar production and company ties to community (USSC 2001). In 1998 USSC began a marketing campaign, announcing a ‘New Sugar Breakthrough!’ and urging consumers to ‘Try the New Sugar Bursting with Goodness’. The ‘breakthrough’ was not the product—granulated white sugar, unchanged for over a century—but the red, white and blue packaging,
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