Sugar from Tropical versus Temperate Regions.—About half the world's sugar comes normally from tropical countries. A century ago the whole supply came from there. The tropical sugar is made from the sugar cane, a plant from 6 to 12 feet tall and resembling a cornstalk without ears. The rest is made from beets and comes from the most advanced countries such as Germany, France, Belgium, western Russia, and the United States.
Sugar is one of the few products in which temperate and tropical regions compete. The tropical regions have a great advantage be cause they possess enormous areas fit for sugar and as yetunused. Moreover, the sugar-care is naturally able to yield much more sugar per acre than are beets. The temperate regions, on the other hand, have the great advantage of being located close to the chief markets, so that their sugar saves freight charges, and of being close to a supply of labor that is vastly more efficient and economical than that of the tropics. Because of these conditions the beet and its methods of treatment have been so much improved that where 18 pounds of beets were needed to make 1 pound of sugar in 1836, only a third as many are now needed. The improvement of the sugar-cane, on the other hand, has scarcely begun. Like many other tropical products it is good in its unimproved state and the backward people of the tropics have not thought of making it better. Now, however, the people of the temperate zone are taking charge of sugar production, and during the next few decades we may expect as great an improvement in the cane as has taken place in the beet.
How Sugar is Raised in the Tropics.—Sugar is so useful and so easily extracted from the sap that great quantities of cane are raised in little patches in most tropical regions, especially where there is plenty of sun as well as water. This home-made sugar, however, rarely reaches the world. markets. Their supply comes from big plantations. Cuba and the other West Indies are the chief sources of the American supply, but almost every tropical country makes some sugar. Most of the plantations are near the seacoast, largely because the coastal regions are not only more accessible than the in terior, but are more apt to have the kind of warm damp plains which the sugar-cane loves. Often too, the immediate coast is more health ful than the hot steamy plains a few miles inland. This is particu
larly the case in countries like British Guiana, where the climate is admirable for sugar, but bad for people. The native labor there is so inefficient and unreliable that it has been necessary to import laborers from the East Indies and India. The contrast between the natives and the imported labor is a good example of the way in which a rice-raising people reaches much higher levels than people whose agri culture has scarcely risen above the point of growing yams.
Many of the sugar plantations, not merely in Guiana, but in most sugar regions, are of large size and highly profitable. In Cuba whence the United States gets most of its cane sugar some plantations employ as many as 5000 people, and have scores of miles of little portable railways which can be laid wherever they are wanted to bring the cane from the fields. In the Hawaiian Islands the absence of any duty on sugar imported into the United States has helped to make sigar the dominant product. In good years profits of three or four hundred dollars per acre are possible. The industry is so profit able that it has been worth while to go to great expense for irrigation.
Water has been pumped in some cases to a level several hundred feet above its source, while in other instances, tunnels have been built through mountains to bring the water from the windward side, where it is deposited by the northeast trades, to the dry, sunny leeward side where the cane grows fastest provided it is well watered.
How Plantations Promote Civilization.—Plantation agriculture is beginning to have an important effect upon tropical civilization. In places where there are no plantations white adventurers still send the natives out into the jungle to gather wild cocoa, wild cinchona, wild rubber, and even wild hemp and wild bananas. The natives live as they have always lived. If they have enough to eat, they stay at home no matter how eager the white man may be to complete a load for his vessel. If one day's work gives food enough for three days, they work only a third of the time, no matter how much the white man complains. If they contract malaria or other diseases in the jungle they die without care or medicine.