Notas sobre la industria azucarera en espacios rurales contrastadosCastilla y León (España) y Alagoas (Brasil)

Abstract

Sugar industry development during the 20th century contributed to economy and consolidation of this activity in Alagoas (Brazil’s northeast) and Castilla y Leon (Spain), two large sugar producer regions in those countries and with contrasting demographic dynamics. Thus we aim at analysing the sugar manufacture formation and evolution as well as discuss its importance nowadays in view of the production and extent it had in the 21th century and their relation with the rural population. The methodology applied is mainly based in historical, rural and economic geography as well as in searches we made in official websites. In Alagoas, the sugar cane monoculture is maintained in the 20th century, along with power plant mo- dern systems, which represented a revolution in the face of traditional mills, some of them did not even survived to such a modernisation: they were either transformed, merged or simply disappeared, and a difficulty in maintai- ning the population in rural areas. Sugar factories genesis in Castilla y León reflects what was happening in the Spanish sector at the end of the 19th century. This was crucial to half of the country’s surface and industrial beet production occurs in the same region currently, in spite of the reduction it has been showing nowadays, as much that weight in beetroot production has not been accompanied by the maintenance of the rural population. The industries gained space and expanded production, being important economy until the end of the 20th century, when the process of restructuring and modernisation, along with national and European policies, forced the mergers, or disappearance, of the smaller groups and the concentration of the largest ones.