From Sugar Cane to Sugar

Prehistoric immigrants to the archipelago brought with them techniques for growing cane, but only in colonial times did sugar production and commercial uses for sugar develop under foreign tutelage. Saccharaum officinarum , true sugar cane, has many relatives of the botanical family of tall, internoded grasses called graminaceae —cogon, talahib, and tigbao, for example—that grow wild all over Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands. It appears that at some indistinguishable time in the past sugar cane was domesticated somewhere in Southeast Asia and taken by Austronesian-speaking migrants to the southern Philippine Islands. From there its cultivation and use gradually extended northward.^[1] Precolonial inhabitants of the islands chewed it as a treat or as a means of assuaging hunger. Mothers employed it as a pacifier for babies, and children ate it mixed with rice. When the fourteenth-century traveler Wang Tayuan visited the archipelago, he observed that natives in different places had acquired the skill

of turning cane juice into wine. Perhaps this was the same process, described by Jesuit missionary Francisco Alzina in the seventeenth-century Visayas, of fermenting in Chinese jars cane juice mixed with a special tree bark to make an alcoholic beverage called intus . This traditional method of fermentation was preserved into the twentieth century by aboriginal Bacobos of Mindanao, who used a wooden press to express juice. Such a press, or one like it, may have originated in prehispanic times, but natives in the islands also extracted juice from some varieties of cane simply by beating two stalks together.^[2]

What the early indios (native inhabitants) did not do was make sugar. When Magellan arrived in 1521, natives in the Mindanao area offered cane to his crew as a refreshment, while Spanish explorers of the Cagayan Valley in northern Luzon received similar gifts in 1591. But not sugar. Sugar was among the items of resupply requested from Mexico by members of the first permanent expedition to the archipelago in 1565. From 1571, when Manila became the established place of Spanish settlement, until the first decades of the next century, Chinese traders regularly imported sugar to the colony. The idea of manufacturing sugar and its byproducts came to the Philippines along the route of colonial conquest: across the Atlantic, via the Azores and Canaries; to the Caribbean; on to Mexico and South America; and finally, across the Pacific.^[3]

Little information exists on how sugar technology initially entered the Philippines. Presumably Spaniards, who had a great taste for the sweetener, encouraged its domestic manufacture to save the considerable import cost from China. Methods of expressing juice from cane between two horizontal wooden rollers, boiling it down in earthen vessels, and crystallizing it were widely known in China and around the Mediterranean Sea, so that either Chinese or Spaniards, or possibly both, could have brought these techniques to the Philippines. Spanish friars played a considerable role in setting up sugar plantations in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and gradually, sugar making spread throughout the archipelago, first to Luzon and then to the Visayas. Local sugar slowly replaced the Chinese imported product, and as the Philippines became self-sufficient, the price dropped appreciably during the seventeenth century.^[4] A kind of brown sugar, called panocha , crystallized in coconut shells with the aid of lime water, is still made today in the countryside and may date back to these early times. With increasingly widespread knowledge of how to derive sugar came a corresponding rise in its consumption by the indigenous population, especially the ruling class. Even before midcentury one Spaniard, Juan Diez de la Calle, noted that sugar abounded in the islands and served as evidence of native wealth; meanwhile, Moro (Muslim Filipino)

sultans served cakes and preserves sweetened with cane syrup as a treat to special guests. Natives learned also to concoct a kind of sugar brandy, probably basi , and by the early eighteenth century, so widespread had its use become that the Spanish government felt obliged to forbid production of this beverage.^[5]

While making ordinary sugar for home use spread generally throughout the archipelago from the mid-seventeenth century on, fabrication of more highly refined grades was restricted to the religious estates near Manila and to Pampanga Province. By 1708, estates like San Pedro Tunason and Makati produced pilon sugar, that is, sugar crystallized in day molds, freer of the molasses found in more common grades of the muscovado type. Augustinians in Pasay and Jesuits in Nasugbu were making higher grade sugar by at least the 1740s, and the latter maintained warehouses on their property so that they could hold their product back until prices reached a high in Manila.^[6] Processing of commercial grades of sugar may have gone back to the late seventeenth century in Pampanga, although specific references to that industry do not appear before the eighteenth. There native farmers grew cane and may even have undertaken the first stage of producing sugar, but Chinese merchants dominated the marketing end of the business, and in 1729 a Spanish governor of the province complained that the Chinese bought all the produce of the area so that they could resell it in Manila.^[7]

Once sugar reached the capital city, no matter from where, the Chinese monopolized its processing and sale. They turned sugar into candy and syrup for drinks (e.g., azucar rosado , a beverage made with caramelized sugar and citrus juice) and packaged it for the slowly growing export trade in native products. A census of Manila Chinese establishments in 1745 noted that the sugar dealers' guild consisted of sixty stores, and the sweetmakers' guild contained twelve.^[8] At its inception, then, the commercial end of the Philippine sugar business came under the control of foreign hands with native participation only at the level of primary production.

The Philippine sugar industry has always depended on external market conditions for its progress and profit, and during the first two centuries of colonial domination Spaniards focused their attention on the renowned trans-Pacific galleons, ignoring the development of indigenously based economic endeavors. The galleon trade, sanctioned as a compromise between mercantile interests in Spain and the Philippines, turned Manila into an entrepôt, a place to exchange highly valued Chinese textiles and wares for Mexican silver, with profits in the archipelago going chiefly to the

resident foreign community of Spaniards and Chinese. The Spanish crown remained amenable to maintaining the Philippines as a religious responsibility supported by its more profitable colonies in Latin America. Native produce had little role in this officially sanctioned commerce, although some sugar made its way onto junks returning to China.^[9]

But Philippine international commerce did not consist only of what the Spanish government officially allowed; a substantial amount of semilegal and illegal trade also occurred, and Philippine goods found a minor outlet through these clandestine channels. Distance from the mother country made official supervision weak, and colonial servants learned ways to profit from overlooking the strict rules of colonial commerce. By the mid-seventeenth century, European vessels, including Dutch and British, visited Manila, and the British East India Company (BEIC) sent its first ship, Seahorse , in 1644, inaugurating trade on a more or less regular basis beginning in the 1670s. Seahorse , on its return to India, carried samples of Philippine sugar, and small quantities of it went into cargos of later BEIC voyages. By the 1750s, Nicholas Norton Nicols, a naturalized Spanish subject living in Manila, pointed out that substantial quantities of Philippine sugar reached both the Coromandel and Malabar coasts of India, Bengal, Persia, and China.^[10] The early pilon sugar industry in the archipelago met those needs.

Still, the sugar industry could not grow beyond certain limits because Mexican silver, the currency of Asian trade, remained the chief object for ships coming to Manila. As late as 1789, export of Philippine sugar did not exceed 30,000 piculs, or 1,898 metric tons, per year, and even in 1819 birds' nests still outranked sugar in value as an export item.^[11] Not until the Spaniards altered their economic policy and international demand for sugar picked up could sugar production really expand. These changes began to take place only toward the end of the eighteenth century. By midcentury falling demand for oriental textiles in Mexico and Spain started the Manila galleon traffic on its long decline toward cessation in 1815, a victim of its own anachronistic nature and the Latin American wars of independence.

To compensate for this decline and to put the Philippines at last on an economically independent basis, the government initiated several reforms following the British occupation of Manila (1762-64). Under a series of progressive governors, Spain sought to break the galleon near monopoly of Philippine international commerce, to encourage the growing of local agricultural produce for export, and to keep profits from this new trade in government coffers. In 1785 Governor José Basco y Vargas created la Real Compañía de Filipinas, designed to link private and government capital

to foster a trade within the empire that trespassed even on the hitherto sacrosanct trans-Pacific route. But this endeavor ultimately failed because of a lack of interest and sound management. For example, while foreign merchants were exporting 14,892 tons of sugar between 1786 and 1802, the company shipped only 509 tons. Basco also established in 1781 la Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais de Manila to foster a new interest in, and publications about, agricultural crops, but again, lack of sustained concern defeated this project. One of the few tangible results of the society's efforts toward promoting sugar was an 1878 manual by Francisco Gutierrez Creps on the art of growing and producing the sweetener.^[12]

The increased international demand for sugar that followed upon the Industrial Revolution stimulated the rise in production. As a result of a petition of la Real Cornpañía de Filipinas, ships of foreign registry began legally to trade in Asian goods at Manila in 1790, thus inaugurating a process of fully opening the port to international commerce by 1834, when the company's charter ended. Initially, the chief beneficiaries of this new policy, as far as the sugar trade was concerned, were Americans who sought new sources of sugar and molasses for their tables and rum distilleries because the British West Indian market had been closed to them following their war of independence. By the mid-1790s, ships from the Atlantic ports, particularly Salem, Massachusetts, frequented Manila; and throughout much of this decade a resident American merchant, John Stuart Ker, acted as broker for U.S. vessels, procuring the cargos of sugar they carried home. As a result of greater sugar consumption among their workers, the English, too, increased their trade and established their first commercial house in Manila in 1809. By the 1820s, England had seven firms at the port, and America one; meanwhile, Americans began consular service in 1817, and the British followed in 1844. These two nations became the chief trading partners of the Philippines and remained so throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

While figures on sugar export for the first quarter of the nineteenth century remain fragmentary, it appears that sometime in the second half of the 1820s sugar began a climb in output that continued more or less unabated until the end of the nineteenth century (see table 1). The official opening of Manila to world commerce in 1834 did not stimulate this rise; rather, the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars and the subsequent freeing up of shipping, as well as a growing demand for sugar in the United States and England, seem to have been the main causes. In 1836 sugar surpassed rice, abaca, and indigo as chief Philippine export and became one of the mainstays of the economy, a condition that has persisted until recent times.^[13]

Up to 1836, even as foreign trade developed, the manner of making and delivering export-quality sugar changed little from what it had been in the preceding century. Innovation came from China around 1800 with the introduction of stone vertical rollers in place of wooden ones and iron cauldrons (cauas ) in place of earthenware ones; otherwise, the sugar business remained as American supercargo Nathaniel Bowditch described it in 1796 when he purchased a cargo of sugar in Manila for his ship Astrea .^[14]

In most Philippine provinces output was small. The sugar was of poor texture and was mainly for local use; nevertheless, a few areas, particularly the Luzon provinces of Pampanga, Bulacan, Pangasinan, and Tondo, earned a good reputation for their product. The former was the most highly regarded for the quality and quantity of its pilon sugar, made from a high

yield, deep red local cane. The success of these regions came in large measure as a result of their proximity to Manila, the center for sugar refining and the only sizable market for consumption of high-grade sugar.

In these provinces, cane, squeezed between stone rollers turned by carabao (water buffalo), released a juice that, when boiled sufficiently in a series of cauldrons, turned into a thick syrup that was poured into conical clay pilones. There, with the aid of stirring and some lime water, the mixture crystallized into a hard substance, a brownish yellow blend of molasses and sugar. Between November and June, traveling agents of refiners purchased pilones, each weighing about 63.5 kilos, from farmer producers and transported them in cascos down the main rivers and streams of Luzon, into Manila Bay, and on to the port area. At small refineries, called farderias , usually operated by Chinese but occasionally by a Spaniard, claying took place. Pilones were broken and sugar separated, the best grade being repacked in new molds. The sugar was then tamped, covered with a thin layer of special clay, and treated with water. As fluid seeped downward, the molasses dripped from a hole in the bottom of the mold into a container below, leaving a purer product, slightly gray on top with a yellow layer underneath. Once the sugar achieved its best color, the pilon was broken and the finest grades separated and dried in the sun; later the finished product was poured into sacks which, when filled, weighed one picul of 63.25 kilos, standard measure of the sugar trade. Merchant refiners stored these bags in warehouses (camarines ) where they awaited sale to foreigners, usually from European and American houses supplying ocean-going vessels. Darker grades could either be reboiled, reclayed, or sold at home, since inhabitants of the Philippines made ample use of various kinds of sugar in their diet.

Another kind of Philippine muscovado, called "mat" sugar, achieved only minor importance in external trade before the 1840s, but found some outlet, mainly to China, Singapore, and Macao. Produced all over the archipelago, but especially in the Visayas, it sold for two-thirds or less the price of pilon sugar, because it was more heavily laden with molasses. In processing mat sugar, cane was passed between wooden rollers and boiled in cauas. Once lime was added to the thickened syrup, final crystallization took place on wooden tables. After drying, the sugar, dark brown in color and resembling a doughy substance, was placed in bayones (buri palm leaf bags of exceptional water resistance) weighing from eighteen to thirty-two kilos each, which were transported to Manila for repackaging and reshipment. Later on, an improved mat sugar garnered a much larger market share as worldwide sugar refining patterns changed, but in the 1830s pilon sugar dominated the trade; moreover, the government took special effort

to preserve the quality of the product. In 1818, an ordinance passed in Pampanga prohibited adulteration of pilon sugar with darker grades.^[15]

Because of market conditions, Philippine export sugar fell in price between 1796 and 1836, as indicated by figures in table 2. Some rise seems to have occurred about the end of the Napoleonic wars, before peacetime shipping fully returned, but, after that, prices did not revert to earlier levels because of changed circumstances in the sugar industry.