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Sugar Production in Northeastern Brazil and Cuba, 1858–1908

One result of the progress in metallurgy and the accompanying decline in the prices of iron and steel in the latter part of the nineteenth century was a transformation of the technology of the production of sugar from cane. Central factories replaced small plantation mills as the use of giant mill tandems, which extracted nearly all the juice from the cane and left a dry powder, became economical. Factory railroads carried the necessary tonnage of cane to these centrals. In Cuba, for example, the expected scale of cane supply to individual mills increased twelvefold and the sugar-to-cane ratio nearly trebled between 1858 and 1908. Also important to this transformation was the growth in the 1870's and 1880's of the beet sugar industry in Europe, stimulated by governmental subsidies and falling wheat prices. Sugar crystallization is essentially the same process, whether beet or cane juice is used. Europeans improved the construction of vacuum pans and turbines so that these machines became more reliable and less expensive. While beyond a minimum size there were no significant returns to scale in crystallization as opposed to extraction, the improved vacuum pans and turbines facilitated the use of large mill tandems. It is hard to imagine a central factory producing twenty thousand tons of sugar a year with open kettles and forms for whitening. Moreover, the increased production of beet sugar contributed to the drop in sugar prices, especially after 1884, which forced many small estates to stop milling. By 1908 the average central sugar factory in Cuba had a sixteen-mile railroad which brought it 130,000 tons of cane a year. In northeastern Brazil—limited here to the states of Alagoas, Paraiba, and Pernambuco— the average central also had a sixteen-mile railroad, but that railroad carried only 40,000 tons of cane. Furthermore, only half of the sugar produced in northeastern Brazil came from central factories, the rest being from small plantation mills. The mills in northeastern Brazil were much smaller than those in Cuba chiefly because soils and topography in the northeast hindered the development of a system of large factories. The cane regions of both Cuba and northeastern Brazil are peneplains. But the Cuban peneplain is in the final stages of erosion, whereas that in northeastern Brazil, recently rejuvenated, has sharp relief. As a result, cane railroads in northeastern Brazil had to follow the meanders of narrow river valleys instead of radiating from the mills in straight lines, and the cane fields were discontinuous because of the hills and rivers.