A Short Sugar Story

Photo:Pixabay

It was the seventies. A carrier ship came to the port in Mezzo America to load the sugar and transport it to New York. The farmers came with their load of sugar on tractors and carts, neatly packed in the sacks. Their goods were clean and neatly packed. But the consignee, a multinational, accepted only bulk cargo. And, guess what? The farmers spent three weeks cutting the neatly packed sacks of sugar open and strewing the contents into the ship's tanks. There was nothing else to do if they wanted payment for their harvest. And most probably that was the only crop-size payment of the year. For them it might have been better to eat the sugar cane unprocessed as it is a good source of minerals and thus good for the bones. 

The cargo ship reached the port of New York where the consignee had its own terminal. After the formal procedures the unloading began. It took three days for four port cargo unloaders (cranes) to unload the bulk sugar. At the end quite some sugar was left in the corners of the tanks which couldn't have been reached by the cranes. To collect that sugar the cranes let down four dredgers. They collected the sugar, but due to the heat produced by dredgers tracks, the sugar that was strewn on the tank floor turned into caramel. Huge amount of bulk caramel was dripping from the dredgers’ tracks while lifting the dredgers up and out of the tanks by the cranes. 

So much for the food safety standards, let alone the care for the haveless.