Sugar and Slaves transformed Liverpool from a sleepy insignificant fishing village, eclipsed by Chester for over four hundred years but the real “revolution” took place in Barbados! How many people know that and how many would use the word “revolutionary” to describe such a simple taken for granted everyday commodity?
Posted by Ron Noon in Beyond The Lane on Monday, December 29th 2008
When Tate & Lyle announced in July 2001 that it was selling off its Domino Sugar refinery operations in Brooklyn New York to an investment group dominated by a Cuban family with extensive cane growing interests in Florida, it hardly registered as a news story outside of the extraordinary world of sugar. FOR ME IT WAS A BIG LEAD TO FOLLOW, EXTENDING THE LOVE LANE SUGAR TRAIL DOWN TO THE SUNSHINE STATE AND NEW QUESTIONS AND ISSUES. I QUICKLY REALISED THAT THE WORLD OF BIG SUGAR AND THE FANJULS IN FLORIDA WAS INEXTRICABLY LINKED TO THE DEGRADATION OF A WORLD ECO-TREASURE, A RIVER OF GRASS CALLED THE EVERGLADES. If you want more graphic confirmation of that fact, ask American novelist Carl Hiassen.
Posted by Ron Noon in Beyond The Lane on Saturday, December 13th 2008
Exactly five years ago today the NYT suggested that “the handful of individuals who control the sugar business in this country..start thinking about a new line of work, and be grateful for the long run they had” and I thought why not blog that fact? How many people think about the BIG in “Big Sugar” and of the Cuban American Family who purchased the Domino Sugar Refineries from Tate & Lyle in 2001?
Posted by Ron Noon in Beyond The Lane on Saturday, November 29th 2008
My film project Love Lane Lives was successfully premiered at the Tate Liverpool on October 30th 2007 and can now be viewed in its entirety on our website but what about the fate of two other sugar films, (and a TV soap series) that came out that same year which unlike our Boys and Girls from the Whitestuff, aroused blatant opposition and resistance from offended “sugar interests”? Bill Haney’s film “The Price of Sugar” narrated by Paul Newman, and Amy Serrano’s “Sugar Babies” are bitter sweet films dealing with abuses of human rights on sugar “bateyes” in the Dominican Republic that we feel demand the oxygen of publicity.
Posted by Ron Noon in Beyond The Lane on Thursday, November 27th 2008