Obituary: The Late (not-so-Great) King Sugar

The declaration was greeted, as such declarations generally are, by much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

The 18 African/Caribbean/Pacific countries which are most affected have lost a pillar of the slave-owning community, a system which has supported for five hundred years the dehumanisation, degradation and inhuman subjection of millions of people, mainly of African descent.

In our parts of the world sugar is more than an industry. It is the living ghost of the slave system under which between 18 and 30 million people were transported across the Atlantic, their lives, families, communities and cultures destroyed, to produce wealth for capitalists in Britain, Europe and the United States.

It was the acme of human parasitism.

And it has taken an unconscionably long time to die.

Among the reasons for its longevity are its offspring; among them modern capitalism, the Industrial revolution, the rotary newspaper press, the steam engine, the railway, the proletarianisation and dehumanisation of millions of people in Europe and elsewhere. And it is this which makes the plaintive bleats of the bereaved so heart rending. A man would need a heart of stone not to laugh, as somebody once said. .

According to the ACP countries, the European Union's cutting of the Gordian umbilical cord last Thursday will bring in its train a host of disasters:for ACP sugar supplying states "and inevitably lead to the destruction of centuries old traditions of sugar production with devastating socio-economic consequences."

I don't know about the devastating socio-economic consequences, but I do know that we are all well rid of the 'centuries-old traditions of sugar production" I cannot believe that this argument could ever form part of an appeal by any self-respecting ex-colonial - but it is the official position of the ACP countries. According to them:

"It is estimated that the [European] Commission's proposal would lead to a loss in income of up to €80400 million annually in ACP countries. the knock on effects of this reform, which hardly bear contemplating, would include:

* macro-economic instability;
* the crippling of national efforts to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals;
* the closure of countless estates;
* the complete undermining of modernisation efforts already underway within the sugar industry; the failure of smallholders' cooperatives and collapse of local farmers' banks;
* massive unemployment, rural instability and urban migration;
* a dramatic and alarming increase in poverty;
* increased crime;
* national destablization in all ACP countries and heightened insecurity in the Caribbean region;
* and environmental degradation."

If all this were true it would indeed be tragic, except that the foolish virgins of the ACP have known for nearly forty years that this day would come and did nothing to prepare for it.

If they had had the imagination and the will to act to defend the interests of the ordinary people, the poor, they would not, as Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson has done, concentrate on improving the confidence and bank accounts of the rich at the expense of the poor; they would not, as Mr Patterson has done, undertake billion US dollar 'infrastructure programmes to build new highways when what was needed was to build the social infrastructure for human development and to reduce poverty, inequality and crime and violence.

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