STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE INTERNATIONAL SUGAR ECONOMY 59 The Historical Background The original and till recently the most important source of white crystal sugar has been the sugarcane plant. Today sugar is produced from other sources as well, namely, beet and maize. Cane, beet and maize sugar are called 'natural' sweeteners while 'artificial' sweeteners include saccharine and aspartame which are synthetic sugars manufactured from petroleum^ chemicals and other raw materials—products of bio-technology. Artificial sugar occupies as yet a low position in the global consumption of sugar even as it has emerged as a major substitute for natural sugar in USA and some other advanced industrial economies. Sugar derived from maize is available in the form of fructose and is essentially marketed as liquid sugar (high fructose corn syrup—HFCS). Other lesser imprtant forms of natural sugar include maltose (from malt), lactose (from milk), glucose and so on. The most important source of sugar however continue to be cane and beet. Sugarcane is essentially a tropical crop, while beet is cultivated in temperate regions. Ihe sugarcane—sugarbeet divide has, therefore, several dimensions. Cane is mainly a Third world crop (though countries like USA, South Africa and Australia also cultivate it) and beet is mainly a developed world crop—confined largely to Europe. More importantly the cultivation of cane for its eventual processing into sugar was the product of colonialism in almost all majcr cane sugar producing countries. While cane was cultivated in parts of Asia for several centuries the discovery that sugar could be manufactured from it and the actual spread of cane cultivation based on this motivation is linked to the conquest of Asia and Africa by Europe. European merchants carried European manufactured goods to Africa exchanging them for African slaves who were transported to Caribbean Islands and put to work on European-owned sugar plantations which produced raw sugar which was transported back to European refineries for processing into crystal white sugar. This triangular trade was one of the many forms of unequal exchange that colonialism had imposed on the territories it had annexed.2 Indeed, it is interesting to note that till the 8th century sugar was unknown to Europe when it was for the first time brought in from the Middle East. However till the 17th century sugar remained a luxury consumed by the European nobility and almost totally absent from peasant consumption baskets.3 The conquest of Barbados in 1627 was a major turning point in the history of sugar consumption since the consequent increase in the availability of the commodity facilitated its consumption by the average European household. So rapid was the growth in sugar consumption, thanks to the slave trade and the sugar trade that also fuelled capital accumulation in Europe, that by the end of the 18th Century sugar was regarded as a necessity rather than a luxury and in the early 1900s contributed to one-fifth of all calories consumed by an average