Why was cane sugar not widely grown in West Africa?

Even today Africa produces only 5% of the world’s cane sugar, with the bulk of production in East and South Africa, although there is production in West Africa. Is there something to do with soil? Since climate wise tropical West Africa seem ideal.

Had sugar been available as a commercial product there would’ve been far less reliance on slave export in the era of triangular trade, or during the Islamic slave trade for that matter.
 
Last edited:
Even today Africa produces only 5% of the world’s cane sugar, with the bulk of production in East and South Africa, although there is production in West Africa. Is there something to do with soil? Since climate wise tropical West Africa seem ideal.

Had sugar been available as a commercial product there would’ve been far less reliance on slave export in the era of triangular trade, or during the Islamic slave trade for that matter.

Economic plantages makes the most sense, at the same time it's very hard work with a high fatality rate. This means that you need a strong ad developed state to ensure that the infrastructure allow plantages to exists, but also to ensure a supply of labour. In Africa the European state had limited ability to upkeep control over more than a few coastal outposts and it was too easy for the slaves to escape. Denmark did try to set up plantages in Africa after it banned the use of the transatlantic slave trade. Denmark did this because they had a greater control over their African hinterland than most European states at the same time. These plantages had mixed success, their attempts to set up sugar plantages failed (the slaves escaped, the soil in the experimental farms was of low quality and the British occupation in general fucked up their farming experiments), but other cash crops (with smaller labour cost and lower fatality rates) was a major success, and many of the large land owners in modern Ghana are descendent of the Danish merchants in their old colony.

So why was sugar farms not established when the other European powers gained control over their hinterland. Well many of them (UK, Portugal and Spain) already produced sugar in their American colonies, at the same time sugar beet began to dominate the sugar production.
 
Sugar plantations required incredibly brutal conditions, with high death rates and people were loathed to work in them. That either means you have to enslave people to do it, or pay them a very high wage rate. If other people are using slave labour, it makes paying high wages an unviable economic model, as you will be undercut. It was hard to enslave people in plantations in Africa, as the natives knew the interior well and could escape into it, and Europeans did not control very far inland so it was easy to go beyond their grasp.
 
These plantages had mixed success, their attempts to set up sugar plantages failed (the slaves escaped, the soil in the experimental farms was of low quality and the British occupation in general fucked up their farming experiments), but other cash crops (with smaller labour cost and lower fatality rates) was a major success, and many of the large land owners in modern Ghana are descendent of the Danish merchants in their old colony.

What were these successful cash crops? I know palm oil did well there.
 
I don't have the answer but apparently there's a whole paper on exactly that topic if you're really interested.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/203419?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

That was excellent, thank you.

So from reading the paper, the Caribbean sugar industry wasn’t successful just because of low cost slave labor, but also because it had well drained volcanic soil on sloped coastal land, which allowed free rain irrigation, low cost of transportation. Whereas in coastal West Africa the land is less fertile, was not well drained and in fact waterlogged with high salinity and high acidity. The paper concedes cane agriculture is possible using river irrigation inland. But this would require expensive canal construction and having to ship the product out from several hundred miles of rivers.

In order for West Africa to become a major sugar exporter during the transatlantic trade period, West Africa would have to be a highly developed agricultural state which local polity was not. They could do it today but its just cheaper to do elsewhere.
 
Wait. Why was it so dangerous?

It’s hard work in hot humid conditions. But the other factor is just tropical diseases. Africans were more disease tolerant than Native Americans, but that just meant they survived a little longer. IIRC life expectancy for Indian slaves in Brazil was 19 and Africans was 24.

Of course steps could be taken to improve work conditions, but there was no economic incentive to do so. Canesugar was so profitable that plantation owners can afford to work half the slaves to death every year and replace them.
 
It’s hard work in hot humid conditions. But the other factor is just tropical diseases. Africans were more disease tolerant than Native Americans, but that just meant they survived a little longer. IIRC life expectancy for Indian slaves in Brazil was 19 and Africans was 24.

Of course steps could be taken to improve work conditions, but there was no economic incentive to do so. Canesugar was so profitable that plantation owners can afford to work half the slaves to death every year and replace them.
So it's not the plant itself

It's the climate and disease.
 
So it's not the plant itself

It's the climate and disease.

And I'm not sure about in America or elsewhere in Africa, but here in South Africa (speaking as someone whose grandparents owned a sugar-cane farm) there are nasty little critters in the fields that take advantage of the cane like snakes (some harmless, some not so much) and cane rats. They burn the fields to get rid of them, but that don't mean the buggers stay gone.

An idea for making the slave-option work is maybe to get slaves from a different region - i.e. if you're working in say Ghana, get people from the other side of Africa or from the Indies (many of the Chinese/Indian population in Natal are descended from the labourers brought in to work the Huletts' sugar farms IIRC). It'd probably be more expensive, but not necessarily prohibitively so (I mean, there must've been a reason that the Dutch bothered to bring their own slaves to the Cape rather than simply take from the interior (and the Dutch at the time were money-oriented, which means that they wouldn't have done something unless the returns were good IMO)
 
And I'm not sure about in America or elsewhere in Africa, but here in South Africa (speaking as someone whose grandparents owned a sugar-cane farm) there are nasty little critters in the fields that take advantage of the cane like snakes (some harmless, some not so much) and cane rats. They burn the fields to get rid of them, but that don't mean the buggers stay gone.

An idea for making the slave-option work is maybe to get slaves from a different region - i.e. if you're working in say Ghana, get people from the other side of Africa or from the Indies (many of the Chinese/Indian population in Natal are descended from the labourers brought in to work the Huletts' sugar farms IIRC). It'd probably be more expensive, but not necessarily prohibitively so (I mean, there must've been a reason that the Dutch bothered to bring their own slaves to the Cape rather than simply take from the interior (and the Dutch at the time were money-oriented, which means that they wouldn't have done something unless the returns were good IMO)

The Cape was sparsely populated compared to tropical West Africa. Their crops were not highly productive, I think it was mostly millet. This changed when Europeans introduced American corn. Also West Africa had an ancient and highly developed slave economy for selling slaves for salt from the Sahel and manufactured goods from North Africa. Not sure if The Cape even had slavery before European arrival.
 
The Cape was sparsely populated compared to tropical West Africa. Their crops were not highly productive, I think it was mostly millet. This changed when Europeans introduced American corn. Also West Africa had an ancient and highly developed slave economy for selling slaves for salt from the Sahel and manufactured goods from North Africa. Not sure if The Cape even had slavery before European arrival.

I wasn't talking about in comparison for crops or whether there was slavery or not before April 1652, I'm merely pointing out that it wouldn't be unthinkable for the cane-farm owners to import workers despite there being natives around.
 
Top