Most people don’t think much about where sugar actually comes from, or who produces it. But then, few people have to smell the foul odors coming from sugar refineries, or have ever talked with the people who perform the hard labor required to grow and harvest sugarcane.
From the middle ages until the nineteenth century, sugar production was a job done mostly by slaves. And sugarcane is still almost universally produced using unjust labor conditions. Harvesting sugarcane is an arduous task that can break workers after only a decade, and most labor long hours for low pay and few, if any, benefits.
Writing for AlterNet, Jill Richardson says:
“Sugar ranks alongside factory farmed animal products as unsustainably produced foods that Americans eat in quantities greater than are healthy. Likewise, both foods benefit from lax federal environmental standards that stick taxpayers with the bill to clean up pollution or simply force citizens to live with a mess that is never cleaned up, and producers of both foods benefit from federal commodity policies that make their products more profitable.”