Plantations

The plantation system has been used as an economic and highly efficient system to produce and manage food crops and their by-products for more than three thousand years (archeological evidence has suggested both the Egyptian and Roman Empires used such systems). However, plantations have also incurred public criticism and outrage because of their exploitation of workers, the owner’s inequitable distribution of plantation power and profits, and the system’s abuse and, in some cases, wholesale destruction of the natural ecosystem as it puts into place a wholly unnatural growing environment at the expense of naturally occurring biodiversity. The plantation system is based on the concept of artificially introducing a single crop that would not otherwise grow in abundance.

Background

Before European colonization of the Americas, medieval sugar plantations thrived in coastal areas of the Mediterranean. The European taste for sugar spurred Portuguese and Spanish settlers to establish sugar plantations on Madeira, Cape Verde, the Canaries, and other Atlantic islands near Africa in the fifteenth century. In the sixteenth century, sugar plantations were started in the Americas by various European colonists, including the Spanish in Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico, the Portuguese and Dutch in Brazil, and the British in the Caribbean.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, British settlements in Massachusetts Bay and Virginia were referred to as plantations, though they were not big farms dedicated to a single crop. Over the course of the century, however, British colonial plantations developed into a system of large-scale farming operations in the American South that each focused primarily on the cultivation of a single crop for export, including cotton, tobacco, rice, watermelons, and sweet potatoes. Plantation owners controlled the land, tools, and also the labor force, made up in large part by enslaved workers from Africa and the Caribbean. The system spread during the eighteenth century, remained in place after the American Revolutionary War, and continued to be an economic mainstay in the Americas through the early twentieth century.

Starting in the first decades after the Revolutionary War, there was a growing moral outcry in the industrial northeastern United States against the immorality of using slave labor. The system was also flawed because of the lack of understanding of how soil and planting works; the constant replanting, done because of the favorable weather of the South, began to deplete the nutrients in the soil and crops grew thinner. In addition, the principal crop, cotton, proved a tedious production process as the cotton bolls had to be separated carefully by hand from the seeds.

With Eli Whitney’s 1793 invention of the cotton gin, which separated the cotton and seeds mechanically, production greatly increased (a single slave could process more than a thousand pounds of cotton in a single day). By 1850 the South was exporting more than a million tons per year. But to meet those economic demands, plantation owners in most cases reduced the living conditions for the slaves to minimal standards and brutalized them to maintain quotas. The American Civil War was fought largely to protect these states’ rights to decide for themselves their economic systems. With the defeat of the South, however, these plantations altered their economic system to introduce sharecropping, or paying workers part of the crop’s worth in return for their working the fields. With the revolution in agricultural sciences in the first decades of the twentieth century (largely as a result of the catastrophic agricultural collapse during the 1930s), the business of growing these crops was taken over by large companies and the plantation houses themselves have since become largely tourist sites, representing historic records of both economic efficiency and inhumanity.

Plantations Today

In the twenty-first century, plantations in Indonesia, China, and South America produce specialized lines of useful timber. These forestry plantations grow, for instance, bamboo (China), teak (Far East), and eucalyptus (Australia), as well as the more familiar fruit orchards and farms that grow Christmas trees. Sugarcane plantations thrive in the Caribbean; originally part of the amorality and brutalities associated with the plantations of the sixteenth century, they are now locally run large-scale farms that are central to their nations’ economy. In warmer climates that permit a virtually year-round growing season, cash crops including cocoa, coffee, tea, black pepper, and rubber are all produced within the plantation system. Modern agricultural techniques and cutting-edge farming equipment have helped make plantations a critical element of the world market. Although few economists dispute the organization and efficiency of plantations to control and direct the world markets for certain cash crops, some economists, however, have pointed out that because the plantation system is designed to market crops to distant sites, they seldom actually help the local economy. In many cases, large-scale farming operations generally pay poor wages because the labor requires little specialization; in the American Southwest, for instance, the plantation system, under the control of conglomerates but operating under the same logic, relies on undocumented immigrant labor to sustain their economic viability.

Today, the system has generated the most intense debate among environmentalists. Defenders of the system cite its control and stewardship of the environment and its diligent and careful replanting of resources as a way to protect the resources’ longevity and integrity. In addition, plantations have become an element of the green revolution, with advocates citing how large-scale replanting actually protects the environment from long-term damage from carbon dioxide generated by the industrial sector; the Kyoto Protocol (1997) specifically listed the plantation system as a necessary element of reducing the effects of such emissions. But critics have cited a wide range of problems with the system beyond the scant wages and poor living conditions of workers or the difficult, backbreaking work involved in maintaining the efficiency of a plantation. Plantations often genetically alter the crops for more efficient growth; dramatically affect the natural ecosystem by introducing single crops that grow in an unnatural abundance that is maintained artificially; destroy wildlife habitats and drain critical wetlands; and without appropriate supervision, deplete the soil through overplanting.

Bibliography

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