By reflecting on the violent origins of the Canadian sugar industry, we can bring wider attention to the exploitation underpinning the history of Canadian cuisine.
A Pacific island woman with a child planting sugar cane in a field, Bingara, Queensland, c 1897.
John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
In 1881, a Pacific Islander woman brought here to work on a sugar cane plantation ran away. She was violently retrieved by her employer. Her story sheds moving light on a dark history of exploitation.
Mercury is a nasty toxin that harms humans and ecosystems. The gold and sugar-cane industries have tackled the problem, and it’s time for coal to follow suit.
Co-founders Craig (left) and Marc Kielburger introduce Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau as they appear at the WE Day celebrations in Ottawa in November 2015.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld
An intense controversy over sending Canadian teens to Cuba to cut sugar cane in the 1970s raises questions about why WE Charity’s international development approach hasn’t been controversial for years.
Phil / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)
Australia has failed to ratify an international treaty to reduce harmful mercury emissions. Mercury exposure can cause kidney damage and brain impairment, especially in children.
A river dike on the Rio Nil near El Asintal, Guatemala.
(Consejo de Comunidades en Defensa del Ambiente del Municipio de El Asintal)
Enslaved workers used to grow cotton and mill flour. Now prisoners grind beef and crate eggs. Here, a historian explores Americans’ troubling habit of consuming the products of slave labor.
Deepak Kumar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Stephen P. Long, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Vijay Singh, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Scientists have engineered sugarcane to increase its oil content and are developing renewable jet aircraft fuel from the oil. The engineered sugarcane could become a valuable energy crop.
Workers process tuna at the Thon des Mascareignes factory in Port Louis, Mauritius.
Reuters
The latest Great Barrier Reef report shows some improvements to water quality over the past five years, but there’s still a lot to do on one particular problem: nitrogen.
When cane toads were released in Australia in 1935, they were the latest innovation in pest control, backed by a level of consensus support that a scientist could only dream of. So what went wrong? Research…
Professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and Director of Integrated Bioprocessing Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign