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This article delves into the history of slavery and racial capitalism in the eastern Mediterranean, with a specific focus on Greece and the Balkan regions. Drawing from Cedric J. Robinson's book "Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition," the author argues that capitalism intertwined with racialism emerged in this area during the late feudal era through the colonization and enslavement of various peoples. The article highlights the significance of Cyprus's medieval sugar plantations as an example of global slavery and racial capitalism, noting its influence on later Caribbean sugar plantations. It also explores the role of Venice in the origin of racial capitalism in the region and the historical connection between sugar production and slavery. Additionally, the text examines the history of Greek slavery, discussing the capture of Greek slaves and the erasure of their ethnic identities through forced baptism and renaming. It also sheds light on the racialization of Greek ethnicity and the harsh treatment of slaves in Rhodes and Crete, particularly focusing on the exploitation of enslaved women. The text challenges Eurocentric narratives of slavery and racism, emphasizing the historical significance of Cyprus's sugar plantations and calling for a reevaluation of European civilization. [Extracted from the article]

Burning biomass on sugarcane plantations can lead to pollution (CO2 emissions) and degradation in soil properties. Adopting non-burning technology can increase the value of biomass by applying it directly to the soil, although this may result in nutrient immobilization, which can hinder optimal plant growth due to high lignin and cellulose content or high CN ratio. On the contrary, composting waste with a decomposer will boost plant nutrient availability and enhance other soil characteristics. This research was aimed to assess the effect of several types of sugarcane organic matter on improving soil characteristics, growth of sugarcane and the CO2 emissions. The study was conducted using a Completely Randomized Factorial Design with two factors: type of organic matter (control, fresh litter and compost of sugarcane biomass) and level of drought stress (100, 75, 50 and 25%). Incubation occurred over 16 weeks, divided into two phases of 8 weeks each. The results showed that the application of organic materials in the form of compost could reduce water loss caused by environmental heat and sugarcane growing process. Furthermore, compost application improved soil chemical and biological properties by increasing soil pH, total nitrogen (N), total phosphate (P), total potassium (K), and the total microbial population, although differences were not significant compared to the control. Additionally, applying organic matter in the form of compost or litter helped suppress or reduce emissions, with compost treatment proving more effective than litter in reducing CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The frontier of colonial Queensland was pushed northward through the second half of the 19th century by proliferating sugar plantations. The cultivation of sugar cane for these plantations rested predominantly on the shoulders of unfree, racialized Pacific Islander workers. This history reveals dialectics of cheap lives and land, as nature was produced for exchange at the commodity frontier, unfolding in crises of disease, death and exhaustion. In exploring the story of this frontier, an opportunity emerges to begin a conversation between a recent return to materialism within Australian historiography and the traditions of eco‐Marxism and Black radicalism. The contention here is that this engagement represents both 'urgent history' and 'truth‐telling', as plantation socioecologies of cheapness continue to (re)produce the crises of the racial Capitalocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Black and Third World Marxist tradition have demonstrated that colonialism is inseparable from historical accounts of global capitalism. This paper contributes to that project through an account of heterochronic capitalist time by indexing both its uneven incorporation of socio-ecological temporalities and its disciplining of enslaved people. To illustrate this, I examine how Western industrial temporal relations are generative of, and imposed through, its conflictual relations with Indigenous Taíno and enslaved West African socio-ecological forms of time within the Caribbean sugar complex. In addition, I emphasize that despite colonial capitalism seeking to merge African and Indigenous socio-ecological temporal knowledge into abstract labour, it is never a totalizing process. In effect, while colonial capitalism wields various techniques to incorporate Indigenous and African life worlds, there are always phenomenological remainders of cultural temporal difference that do not reproduce the logic of capital. Highlighting two contrasting postcolonial readings of Marx's notion of subsumption, I argue that we can index the existence of a multiplicity of non-linear and cyclical forms of eternal time that comingle and link past, present and futurity. Inscribing their own emergent dialectics, however, I caution that preserved forms of temporal difference can potentially be taken up in service to reactionary political projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment in the1830s of the Indian indentured labour system as a cheap labour source for British sugar plantations provoked criticism from parliamentarians, missionaries and labour advocates who considered indenture the reintroduction of slavery by another name. Like slavery, the indenture system bonded into labour non-white, poor and unfree workers, already subordinated within the British empire. Like slavery, the Indian indentured labour system was structurally disabling. The development of colonial racial typologies of the ideal labourer embedded race into notions of the able bodied worker. While being of a preferred racial type was a condition of fitness to work it also exposed labourers to the disabling circumstances of being unfree labour on sugar plantations. Indenture practised in Fiji from 1879 to 1917 reflects the disabling effects of racial and economic subordination even in the late indenture period when labour conditions had improved. The development of systematic government measures to select workers as fit for the regulation of plantation labour and the disabling impacts of injury, illness, sexual and mental trauma experienced on the plantation, qualify the notion that modern western ideas of disability emerge primarily from urban industrializing environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugarcane croplands account for ~70% of global sugar production and ~60% of global ethanol production. Monitoring and predicting gross primary production (GPP) and transpiration (T) in these fields is crucial to improve crop yield estimation and management. While moderate-spatial-resolution (MSR, hundreds of meters) satellite images have been employed in several models to estimate GPP and T, the potential of high-spatial-resolution (HSR, tens of meters) imagery has been considered in only a few publications, and it is underexplored in sugarcane fields. Our study evaluated the efficacy of MSR and HSR satellite images in predicting daily GPP and T for sugarcane plantations at two sites equipped with eddy flux towers: Louisiana, USA (subtropical climate) and Sao Paulo, Brazil (tropical climate). We employed the Vegetation Photosynthesis Model (VPM) and Vegetation Transpiration Model (VTM) with C4 photosynthesis pathway, integrating vegetation index data derived from satellite images and on-ground weather data, to calculate daily GPP and T. The seasonal dynamics of vegetation indices from both MSR images (MODIS sensor, 500 m) and HSR images (Landsat, 30 m; Sentinel-2, 10 m) tracked well with the GPP seasonality from the EC flux towers. The enhanced vegetation index (EVI) from the HSR images had a stronger correlation with the tower-based GPP. Our findings underscored the potential of HSR imagery for estimating GPP and T in smaller sugarcane plantations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Munro Tapp, the largest post-foundation benefactor to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was a prominent lawyer who directed multiple businesses interested in water utilities, motor car manufacturing, and brewing. That much is acknowledged at Caius today. Yet Tapp was also a director of the sugar refiners Manbré & Garton Limited, and he helped establish a sugar plantation in Kenya. Alongside his involvement in an African estate, he held investments in other plantations and colonial enterprises. He was part of a class of gentlemanly capitalists who participated in imperial expansion and then donated their wealth to British cultural institutions, including colleges and universities. While much public attention has been paid to Cecil Rhodes, this article argues that both Tapp and Rhodes were members of a larger group of men and women who provided their wealth to educational institutions, thereby entrenching the financial legacies of colonialism in universities. By focusing on more minor figures in the British empire, like Tapp, historians can better address the continuities of universities' financial connections to coerced labour and colonialism across time and understand that private connections and affective attachments between individuals and institutions were as significant as governmental policies in directing the spoils of empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Water resource development projects are essential for increasing agricultural productivity and ensuring food security. However, these activities require the modification of pre-existing environmental settings, which may alter mosquito larval habitat availability and seasonality. The intensive utilization of current adult vector control tools results in insecticide resistance among the main vectors. When coupled with behavioural resistances, a shift in malaria vector feeding and resting behaviours could compromise the effectiveness of the current adult vector control strategies. Thus, it is important to look for new or alternative vector control interventions for immatures to complement adult control by focusing on different larval habitats and their seasonal availability. Thus, this study investigated larval habitat seasonality and seasonal larval abundance and distribution in irrigated sugar cane plantation settings in Ethiopia. Methods: Anopheles mosquito larval habitats were surveyed and visited twice a month for a period of 14 months. Anopheline larvae and pupae were collected, reared, and fed finely ground fish food. Adults were provided with sucrose solution and kept under standard conditions. Female Anopheles mosquitoes were identified morphologically and using a species-specific PCR assay. Environmental parameters, which include habitats' physico-chemical characteristics, were assessed. Larval habitat diversity and larval abundance and distribution were determined across different seasons. Results: The study revealed that Anopheles gambiae sensu lato (s.l.) was the most predominant 4197(57%) vector species, followed by Anopheles coustani complex 2388 (32.8%). Molecular analysis of sub-samples of An. gambiae s.l. resulted in Anopheles arabiensis (77.9%) and Anopheles amharicus (21.5%), and the remaining 1.1% (n = 7) sub-samples were not amplified. Physico-chemical parameters such as temperature (t = 2.22, p = 0.028), conductivity (t = 3.21, p = 0.002), dissolved oxygen (t = 7.96, p = 0.001), nitrate ion (t = 2.51, p = 0.013), and ammonium ion (t = 2.26, p = 0.025) showed a significant and direct association with mosquito larval abundance. Furthermore, mosquito larval abundance was correlated with distance to the nearest houses (r = − 0.42, p = 0.001), exposure to sunlight (r = 0.34, p = 0.001), during long and short rainy season animal hoof prints, truck tires/road puddles and rain pools were negatively correlated (r = − 0.22, p = 0.01) and types of habitat (r = − 0.20, p = 0.01). Significant habitat type productivity were observed in man-made pools (t = 3.881, P = 0.01163), rain pools, animal hoof prints, (t = − 4.332, P = 0.00749 in both short and long rainy season, whereas, during dry seasons habitat type productivity almost similar and have no significance difference. Conclusion: The study found that different larval habitats had variable productivity in different seasons, and that physical and physicochemical features like ammonium and nitrate, as well as the distance between larval habitats and households, are related to larval production. As a result, vector control should take into account the seasonality of Anopheles larval habitat as well as the impact of pesticide application on larval source management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the richest ecosystems in bioluminescent Coleoptera in Brazil, the Cerrado (savannas) is the most threatened one by agricultural expansion. The Emas (PNE) and Chapada dos Guimarães (PNCG) National parks are 2 of the last main remnants of the original Cerrado ecosystems in Central-west Brazil. During the past 3 decades, we have conducted several expeditions to collect, observe and study bioluminescent beetles occurring in the PNE and surrounding farms. More recently we also started to investigate the PNCG. We recorded a total of 51 bioluminescent species, including fireflies (n = 29), click beetles (n = 11), phengodids (n = 10), and staphylinids (n = 1). The PNE region was the richest one, especially for phengodids (n = 9). Among the habitats that compose the Cerrado physiognomy, the Cerrado and cerradão hosted most of the bioluminescent species, followed by forest, open fields and marshes. Most fireflies inhabiting the Cerrado ecosystem emit yellow-green light, whereas most click beetles emit predominantly green light, and among phengodid species, orange and red-light emission was found in 3 species. The spectacular click beetle Pyrearinus termitilluminans Costa-lodging luminous termite mounds were found in PNE and also reported for the first time at PNCG. In the farms around the PNE, however, a declining number of bioluminescent species was recorded in cerradão areas after the replacement of the surrounding cattle pastures by sugarcane plantations, especially adult phengodid males that were no longer attracted to light traps. Habitat reduction, use of agricultural pesticides and artificial night lighting are thought to be the major causes of such impact on bioluminescent beetle diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugarcane is one of the major agricultural crops with high economic importance in Thailand. Periodic waterlogging has a long-term negative effect on sugarcane development, soil properties, and microbial diversity, impacting overall sugarcane production. Yet, the microbial structure in periodically waterlogged sugarcane fields across soil compartments and growth stages in Thailand has not been documented. This study investigated soil and rhizosphere microbial communities in a periodic waterlogged field in comparison with a normal field in a sugarcane plantation in Ratchaburi, Thailand, using 16S rRNA and ITS amplicon sequencing. Alpha diversity analysis revealed comparable values in periodic waterlogged and normal fields across all growth stages, while beta diversity analysis highlighted distinct microbial community profiles in both fields throughout the growth stages. In the periodic waterlogged field, the relative abundance of Chloroflexi, Actinobacteria, and Basidiomycota increased, while Acidobacteria and Ascomycota decreased. Beneficial microbes such as Arthrobacter, Azoarcus, Bacillus, Paenibacillus, Pseudomonas, and Streptomyces thrived in the normal field, potentially serving as biomarkers for favorable soil conditions. Conversely, phytopathogens and growth-inhibiting bacteria were prevalent in the periodic waterlogged field, indicating unfavorable conditions. The co-occurrence network in rhizosphere of the normal field had the highest complexity, implying increased sharing of resources among microorganisms and enhanced soil biological fertility. Altogether, this study demonstrated that the periodic waterlogged field had a long-term negative effect on the soil microbial community which is a key determining factor of sugarcane growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the Brazilian carteira de trabalho (work card) and its usage on the sugarcane plantations of Alagoas, Northeast Brazil. It draws on photography and interviews with rural workers to analyse how documents have been used to manage and reproduce precarious work. On the plantations, work cards function as a managerial tool allowing workforce surveillance and control. Moreover, sugar mills can control rural workers' mobility and shape the agricultural reserve army by retaining these documents, thereby immobilising wage workers. While the work card symbolises occupational citizenship and materialises the labour legislation, in practice, it becomes a disciplinary instrument supporting the agribusiness' strategies of identification, control, and deployment of precariously employed and exploited labour on the plantations. Finally, the article contributes with an innovative historical–biographical approach to the study of institutional mechanisms used to produce and reproduce precarious work in Brazil's sugarcane plantations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugarcane dry rot emerged as an important stalk disorder in newly expanded plantations in northwestern São Paulo, Brazil, under the current no-burning fully mechanical harvest policy gradually implemented in the past 20 years. This emergence was probably due to a considerable increase in both pathogen inocula and insect pest populations in sugarcane crop residues kept in the field. In this study, we surveyed the incidence of three stalk-related disorders in commercial sugarcane fields in six municipalities in northwestern São Paulo and the corresponding yield losses. The three stalk-related disorders surveyed were as follows: the red rot disease caused by the fungal pathogen Colletotricum falcatum, the spittlebug-induced shoot stunting, and the stem dry rot, which is associated with the simultaneous infection of C. falcatum and Thielaviopsis paradoxa, the pineapple set rot pathogen. Red rot disease was detected in 88.2% of the fields surveyed, while the spittlebug-induced shoot stunting disorder and the internal stem dry rot were found in 97.1% of the fields. Stem dry rot had the highest incidence and resulted in the highest yield losses. Total sugarcane yield losses were estimated at 20.1%, with an average of 14.2 (±3.8) t·ha−1 per field. The multiple regression model constructed to determine which of the three stem-related disorders contributed the most to total yield losses was not significant. Subsequently, the performance analyses of single-variable polynomial regression models indicated that the simple linear model was the best fit in terms of independently predicting sugarcane yield losses based on each stem-related disorder. Positive and significant correlations were only detected between sugarcane yield losses in t·ha−1 and the incidence of red rot disease or leafhopper-induced shoot stunting. We concluded that the stalk's internal dry rot, as a disease complex associated with both C. falcatum and T. paradoxa, was the most important disorder in sugarcane fields in the northwest region of São Paulo state. A sustainable pest management program is needed to reduce the impact of all three stalk-associated disorders on regional sugarcane production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sugarcane is an important raw material for sugar and chemical production. However, in recent years, various sugarcane diseases have emerged, severely impacting the national economy. To address the issue of identifying diseases in sugarcane leaf sections, this paper proposes the SE-VIT hybrid network. Unlike traditional methods that directly use models for classification, this paper compares threshold, K-means, and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms for extracting leaf lesions from images. Due to SVM's ability to accurately segment these lesions, it is ultimately selected for the task. The paper introduces the SE attention module into ResNet-18 (CNN), enhancing the learning of inter-channel weights. After the pooling layer, multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is incorporated. Finally, with the inclusion of 2D relative positional encoding, the accuracy is improved by 5.1%, precision by 3.23%, and recall by 5.17%. The SE-VIT hybrid network model achieves an accuracy of 97.26% on the PlantVillage dataset. Additionally, when compared to four existing classical neural network models, SE-VIT demonstrates significantly higher accuracy and precision, reaching 89.57% accuracy. Therefore, the method proposed in this paper can provide technical support for intelligent management of sugarcane plantations and offer insights for addressing plant diseases with limited datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disciplining and ordering of informal settlement in Puerto Rico is made legible in contemporary cases such as the Villa Sin Miedo land occupation—or rescate de tierra (land rescue)—but can be located much farther back in the island’s agrarian history. My exercise in this essay is to locate traces of racial ordering first in the cañaverales (sugar plantations), and walk them through the mass evictions of urban settlers and the erection of the first residenciales (public housing), in mid-century San Juan. Through the archive, it becomes apparent that Puerto Rican elites and US technocrats shared a vision of modernity wherein humanness, or “‘human’ as modernity sanctioned,” was fundamentally distanced from rurality and Brownness/Blackness. Following Deborah Thomas’s working of “prior-ness,” and what scholars like Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick have termed “plantation logic,” I argue that sugar-plantation logic—what I call cañaveral logic—is indexed in how the state and its cadre of decision-making elites order residents from the arrabales and later caseríos [public housing projects]. Contrary to what the dominant narrative—supplanted by criollo literature, media, and plans—might suggest, urban settlers pushed back on the “commonsense arrangements” of the modernizing project to open up more humanly workable geographies within the contours of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conversion of native forest into agricultural land, which is common in many parts of the world, poses important questions regarding soil degradation, demanding further efforts to better understand the effect of land use change on soil functions. With the advent of 3D computed tomography techniques and computing power, new methods are becoming available to address this question. In this direction, in the current work we implement a modification of the Fisher–Shannon method, borrowed from information theory, to quantify the complexity of twelve 3D CT soil samples from a sugarcane plantation and twelve samples from a nearby native Atlantic forest in northeastern Brazil. The distinction found between the samples from the sugar plantation and the Atlantic forest site is quite pronounced. The results at the level of 91.7% accuracy were obtained considering the complexity in the Fisher–Shannon plane. Atlantic forest samples are found to be generally more complex than those from the sugar plantation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Cuban sugar industry has experience in the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) since 2001, with the limitation of using proprietary tools and without accessible centralized databases. As a higher step, a Spatial Data Infrastructure (IDE-Azcuba) has been developed by Geocuba for the management of the sugarcane areas of Villa Clara. The IDE-Azcuba manages geospatial images from satellites (Sentinel-2) which allows the calculation of various indices of agricultural importance. For its deployment, this application consumes a large amount of data and is relatively highly complex, which makes it inaccessible to sugar companies and producers. As a solution, a Geoportal is proposed as a light version of the IDE-Azcuba, accessible from cell phones, within the reach of sugar producers and companies. The information on sugarcane variables obtained from INICA's technical scientific services has been integrated into the Geoportal. Such as: Territorial Planning, Varieties and Seeds, Integral Weeds, Fertilizers and Amendments; and Phytosanitary. Having a built-in cache version that allows you to work offline with the most important information, directly in the plantations and productive units, where there are major connectivity problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, British colonists in Jamaica became increasingly exasperated by the damage caused to their sugar plantations by rats. In 1872, a British planter attempted to solve this problem by introducing the small Indian mongoose (Urva auropunctata). The animals, however, turned on Jamaica's insectivorous birds and reptiles, leading to an explosion in the tick population. This paper situates the mongoose catastrophe as a closing chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century acclimatization movement. While foreign observers saw the introduction of the mongoose as a cautionary tale, caricaturing British Jamaica as overrun by a plague of weasels and ticks, British colonists, administrators and naturalists – identifying a gradual decline of both populations – argued that the 'balance of nature' would eventually reassert itself. As this paper argues, through this dubious claim they were attempting to retrospectively rationalize or justify the introductions and their disastrous aftermath. This strategy enabled them to gloss over the lasting ecological damage caused by the mongoose, and allowed its adherents to continue their uncritical support of both the Jamaican plantation economy and animal introductions in the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Dutch bankers channeled investors' funds to sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean, Surinam in particular. Agency problems between plantation owners, bankers, and investors led to an arrangement called negotiaties. Bankers oversaw plantations' cash flows and placed mortgage debt with investors. We demonstrate how this securitization arrangement worked using market-wide data and detailed records from banker F. W. Hudig. During the boom, debt contracts and their securitization were an effective solution for planters, bankers, and investors. However, the market crashed after an oversupply of credit. This led to inefficient restructuring due to debt overhang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In this article, I utilize the concept of the Plantationocene as an analytical framework to generate a holistic and historical understanding of the present-day struggles of a mostly Haitian migrant workforce on sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic. Methods: Inspired by Paul Farmer's methodology, I combine political economy, history, and ethnography approaches to interpret the experiences of sugarcane cutters across historical and contemporary iterations of colonial, post-colonial, and neo-colonial practices over the course of five centuries. Results: My findings elucidate the enduring power of capitalism, implicating corporate and state elites, as the structural scaffolding for acts of racialized violence that condition the life-and-death circumstances of Black laborers on Caribbean plantations to this day. Although today's sugarcane cutters may suffer differently than their enslaved or wage labor ancestors on the plantation, I argue that an unfettered racialized pattern of lethal exploitation is sustained through the structural violence of neoliberalism that links present conditions with the colonial past. Conclusions: Ultimately, this paper contributes understandings of the plantationocene's enduring effects in the global south by demonstrating how imperialist arrangements of capitalism are not a distant memory from the colonial past but instead are present yet hidden and obscured while relocated and reanimated overseas to countries like the Dominican Republic, where American capitalists still exploit Black bodies for profit and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The production of fuels and other industrial products from renewable sources has intensified the search for new substrates or for the expansion of the use of substrates already in use, as well as the search for microorganisms with different metabolic capacities. In the present work, we isolated and tested a yeast from the soil of sugarcane irrigated with vinasse, that is, with high mineral content and acidic pH. The strain of Meyerozyma caribbica URM 8365 was able to ferment glucose, but the use of xylose occurred when some oxygenation was provided. However, some fermentation of xylose to ethanol in oxygen limitation also occurs if glucose was present. This strain was able to produce ethanol from molasses substrate with 76% efficiency, showing its tolerance to possible inhibitors. High ethanol production efficiencies were also observed in acidic hydrolysates of each bagasse, sorghum, and cactus pear biomass. Mixtures of these substrates were tested and the best composition was found for the use of excess plant biomass in supplementation of primary substrates. It was also possible to verify the production of xylitol from xylose when the acetic acid concentration is reduced. Finally, the proposed metabolic model allowed calculating how much of the xylose carbon can be directed to the production of ethanol and/or xylitol in the presence of glucose. With this, it is possible to design an industrial plant that combines the production of ethanol and/or xylitol using combinations of primary substrates with hydrolysates of their biomass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group‐differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is reorienting global development. Few scholars, however, query relationships between green silk road discourse, BRI infrastructure, partner state development goals, and environmental governance. This article details the roots of green silk road discourse in efforts to environmentally engineer China's desert landscapes. Much like large-scale nature-based infrastructure projects in China, BRI infrastructure projects abroad precipitate a range of socioeconomic and environmental outcomes. Through juxtaposing terrestrial infrastructure development in Ethiopia with maritime infrastructure development in Djibouti, the article demonstrates how different types of BRI infrastructure projects shape environmental governance and advance the development agendas of partner countries. Sugar plantations, roads, railways, and energy infrastructure in Ethiopia further Ethiopian state development plans while transforming Indigenous people's relations to their land and livelihoods. In Djibouti, port infrastructure and military bases figure centrally in strategic rentiership for the Djiboutian state with ancillary effects on fisheries and international trade. The article illustrates how relative articulations between East African central government development interests, environmental governance, and infrastructure are mediated by varieties of Chinese capital. The comparative analysis disrupts simplistic narratives of "win-win" partnerships and "China as threat" to partner state autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the values of older enslaved women on cotton and sugar plantations in the antebellum lower Mississippi Valley. Planters derived efficiency value from aged enslaved women's medical knowledge, domestic skills, and care-taking skills, believing that these qualities could be used to create maximally productive workforces. This meaning that planters and overseers placed on some older women was a perversion of value these women often held within enslaved communities. Enslaved people valued medical knowledge and a specific kind of social tact known as 'Mother Wit' because they were crucial tools for surviving slavery and resisting its degrading effects. The article utilizes plantation business records, agricultural trade publications, interviews with formerly enslaved people, and a composite and speculative methodology akin to Marisa J. Fuentes' approach to 'archival fragments'. It builds on the work of historians of enslaved aging as well as scholarship in the history of plantation medicine and the history of capitalism and slavery. Ultimately, this research demonstrates that there were complex understandings of aging on the plantation to both enslavers and the enslaved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phytosanitary control of crops requires the rapid mapping of diseases to enable management attention. This study aimed to evaluate the potential of vegetation indices for the detection of sugarcane mosaic disease. Spectral indices were applied to hyperspectral images collected by an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to find the areas affected by the mosaic virus in sugarcane. Identifying indices capable of detecting diseased plants in agricultural crops supports data processing and the development of efficient tools. A new index was designed based on spectral regions, which presents higher differences between healthy and mosaic virus-infected leaves to enhance hyperspectral image pixels representing diseased plants. Based on the data generated, we propose the anthocyanin red edge index (AREI) for mosaic virus detection in sugarcane plantations. An index that can adequately identify sugarcane infected by the mosaic virus may incorporate wavelengths associated with variations in leaf pigment concentrations as well as changes in leaf structure. The indices that assessed to detect plants infected with the sugarcane mosaic virus were the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalised difference vegetation index red edge (NDVI705), new vegetation index (NVI), ARI2 and AREI. The results showed that AREI presented the best performance for the detection of mosaic in sugarcane from UAV images, giving an overall accuracy of 0.94, a kappa coefficient of 0.87, and omission and inclusion errors of 2.86% and 10.52%, respectively. The results show the importance of wavelengths associated with the concentration of chlorophyll and anthocyanin and the position of the red edge for the detection of diseases in sugarcane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Brazilian colonial context led the Tupiniquim, an Indigenous group, and the Portuguese, a colonizing group, from the São Vicente area to connect with two places in Rio de Janeiro. In this scenario emerges the genealogy of two Tupiniquim women of the 16th century from São Vicente, which allowed us to trace six generations of women who formed kinship relationships with Portuguese men. They moved to Rio de Janeiro to create the Cara de Cão fortification and Camorim sugar plantation. They were members of the communities that appropriated and transformed Portuguese coarse ware ceramics into what is now termed Paulistaware. This article shows a new understanding of the social role of Indigenous women and the entry of European men into symmetrical gender relations based on the logic of Tupiniquim social collaboration. Tupiniquim women initially produced Paulistaware before 1550. After 1600 these ceramics were also made and consumed by people from the African diaspora and others from outside, adding decorative elements found in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The intensive analysis of archival data breaks the traditional model of homogenization and Europeanization of historical processes and events, highlighting the itinerancy of practices and mobility of people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Soil compaction can occur due to the intensity of tractor traffic in the tillage process. The objective of this study was to determine the changes in physical, mechanical properties of the soil and plant growth that occurred due to tractor traffic and how it would affect if the addition of organic matter (compost) was added to the soil. Methods: The experimental work was conducted at the Sugarcane Plantation of PTPN II Klumpang at an initial soil moisture content of 24.69% and a bulk density of 1.08 gr/cm3 with compost and no compost then the land is traversed by the tractor with 2,4 and 6 passes. Result: The results of indicate that the tractor trajectory and the addition of compost have a significant effect on soil compaction. The highest values for water content, bulk density, particle density and penetration resistance were obtained at 6 times tractor traffic with soil without compost sowing respectively 35.36%, 1.31 gr/cm3, 1.87 gr/cm3, 9.61 kgf/cm2, while in soil with compost, the values obtained were 33.62%, 1.23 gr/cm3, 1.82 gr/cm3, 9.04 kgf/cm2, respectively. These findings indicated that the application of compost can reduce the level of soil density so that plant growth becomes better and more even rate of plant growth is obtained than without compost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Agricultural burning is a common practice in sugarcane plantations in Mexico that exerts positive and negative effects on the soil. However, there is no consensus on the soil changes caused by the burning, thus highlighting the need to study this phenomenon through low-cost and quick-toanalyze indicators. Magnetic and color techniques can be indirect, fast, and cheap methods that can help to understand the chemical changes that agricultural burning causes to soils. We aim to evaluate the color and magnetic susceptibility of the soil as indicators of changes caused by agricultural burning. The study was carried out on a Vertisol grown with sugarcane in Tabasco, Mexico. Soil samples were taken at ten sites within the plot, at each site soil samples were collected every two centimeters up to 20 cm of soil depth, before and after agricultural burning. In total, 200 soil samples were analyzed. Temperatures were recorded during agricultural burning at 0, 2, and 5 cm depths. The parameters and color indices were analyzed in the CIE-L*a*b* system in the soil samples, and the high and low-frequency magnetic susceptibility were measured with Bartington MS2 equipment. After agricultural burning, the soils showed increased dark tones at four centimeters depth. Also, magnetic parameters showed changes in soil for the 4 cm in depth after the agricultural burning. The results show that color and magnetic susceptibility are efficient soil properties for identifying soil modifications caused by agricultural burning. In this case study, the effect of agricultural burning on sugarcane crops was short-term and shallow in the soil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Understand environmental racism as a contributor to existential suffering at the end of life. 2. Use principles of trauma-informed care to engage in conversation with patients about their experiences with environmental racism. Environmental racism or injustice refers to the inequitable distribution of environmental harm in patterns that disproportionately impact racially marginalized groups. Palliative Care clinicians must be able to use principles of trauma-informed care to engage in conversations about the ways environmental racism is implicated in how patients narrate and conceptualize their care at the end of life. In southern Louisiana, a heavily polluted industrial corridor is nationally referred to as "Cancer Alley" due to the excess cancer risk imposed by air toxin levels far exceeding EPA maximum standards. The Palliative Medicine service at a tertiary care center near Cancer Alley sees a number of patients with multiple concurrent cancers, who attribute some of their physical and existential suffering to this ongoing toxic exposure. The challenges these patients face offer lessons for Palliative Care clinicians practicing near "hot spots" of environmental toxins across the country. Environmental racism refers to the inequitable distribution of environmental harm in patterns that disproportionately impact racially marginalized groups. The oil refineries and plastics facilities of Cancer Alley are built on former sugarcane plantations, and many Black residents trace their ancestry to enslaved populations there. A recent model using EPA data from 2014 to 2018 showed excess lifetime cancer risk in parts of the Louisiana petrochemical corridor to be as high as 1 in 210, or 47 times the acceptable risk per EPA standards. Residents of Cancer Alley have long observed the high cancer rates amongst their families and neighbors, observations only recently supported by published data. These patients' existential suffering is compounded by the concrete history of racism and structural disparities that has contributed to their illness, as well as by the fight for recognition of environmental injustices. When facing illness and end of life, these patients also know that their family and community members continue to suffer from the same toxic exposures. Facing environmental racism is a form of trauma, and Palliative Care clinicians must be able to approach it using principles of trauma-informed care. We discuss three cases to illustrate the ways in which environmental racism is implicated in patients' narration and conceptualization of their care at the end of life. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging, JusticeManaging Suffering and Distress [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates Morocco's invasion of the West African Songhai Empire in 1591 within the global histories of race, slavery, and capitalism. Morocco's invasion, which took place during the height of the Sàdi dynasty (1554–1659), provided Morocco with an influx of capital through Black West African slave labour on Morocco's sugar plantations and its newfound control over the lucrative gold and salt mines of West Africa. Such wealth and power bolstered Morocco's regional and global position in the vital node where Africa, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Atlantic all converge. This paper will address the following questions: how did Morocco's shift from enslaving non-Muslims to enslaving Muslim West Africans from the Songhai based on their race lay down the foundations for centuries of anti-Black violence in North Africa? (2) how did Black slave labour from the Songhai allow Morocco to become England's primary source of sugar imports prior to the rise of sugar plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean? (3) how can we move beyond normative taxonomies that view North and West Africa as separate spaces instead of as regions whose conditions were shaped by one another? Ultimately, my paper will demonstrate how the Sàdi dynasty was an active player in the rise of racialized forms of slavery that eventually dominated the Atlantic for centuries and whose afterlives continue to endure on both sides of the Atlantic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2009, the Chinese state‐owned corporation SINLANX has been managing the Anjava Sugar Plantation, previously managed by French, Malagasy, and Mauritian companies, in northern Madagascar. Built upon the infrastructure constructed by the French colonial regime and operating based on a collaboration agreement between SINLANX and the Malagasy state‐owned sugar company, Anjava presents a telling story of spatialized acts of survival and racialized conflicts over land and water in the interstitial spaces between capitalist production and subsistence economy. Malagasy villagers' access to resources is often squeezed by multiple enclosures: a water‐delivery system and a land‐distribution system that prioritize sugar production and a bureaucratic system that punishes those who transgress the enclosures. Although Anjava villagers take advantage of the rhythm of sugar harvests and the nature of fire to sabotage sugar production or to make water claims for their livelihood, the agrarian and infrastructural arrangements at Anjava have perpetuated conditions of chronic precarity and profound marginalization of a landless population. The struggles at Anjava must be contextualized in the complex and ambiguous spaces between capital and labor, livelihood and resistance, dominance and adaptation, and ethnic collaboration and hostility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

White grubs are root feeding larvae of beetles (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) that are sporadic pests in agriculture and can lead to economic damage. The grubs feed on the roots of plants, while the adult beetle can bore into underground stems, as well as cause defoliation of plants. Sporadic incidence of larvae with symptoms of nematode infections were detected in wattle and sugarcane plantations in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. The larvae with infection symptoms were isolated, washed, and put on water traps to collect infective juveniles of possible nematode infections. Three species of entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) were isolated from the white grub larvae. These included Steinernema bertusi isolated from Maladera sp. 4., Oscheius myriophila from Maladera sp. 4 and Schizonchya affinis, and Steinernema fabii isolated from Maladera sp. 4., Pegylis sommeri, and S. affinis. Of these S. fabii was the most common species in the sample (87%). This is the first report of such a high diversity of locally occurring EPNs found naturally associated with white grub species in this region of South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main objectives of sugarcane plantations is to increase their longevity without decreasing agricultural productivity. In the present study, we analyzed the proteome of the axillary buds of 'RB966928' to investigate possible changes in the number of proteins at different cutting stages. Using tryptic digestion followed by ultra-performance liquid chromatography coupled with high-resolution timeof-flight mass spectrometry, 122 proteins were identified from the proteome of the axillary buds of 'RB966928'. Of the 122, respectively 97 and 95 proteins were detected at the first and fifth cutting stages, of which 27 and 25 proteins were unique to the respective stage. Proteins that prevent the misfolding of polypeptides generated under stress were exclusively detected at the first cutting stage. Meanwhile, proteins associated with stress responses and disease resistance were exclusively detected at the fifth cutting stage. The present proteomic analysis in the regrowth cycles and axillary bud development of 'RB966928' significantly advanced our understanding of the biological processes linked to the reduction of agricultural productivity of sugarcane with the advancement of cutting age. Absence of proteins to tolerate adverse growth conditions at the fifth cutting stage may be related to reduced agricultural productivity, in addition to environmental stress, soil compaction, nutrient availability, cultural practices, and pests or pathogen attacks at different phenological stages of crops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the subdistricts located downstream of the Belawan Watershed is Hamparan Perak. The population in the Deli Serdang Regency is increasing every year. It causes increasing of land needs to be expanded in to any forms. Currently, there is no available data and information related to land-use changes, impacts and responses carried out in Hamparan Perak that can be used to support planning data in managing this area. Hamparan Perak is included in Deli Serdang Regency, North Sumatra Province, Indonesia. This study analyses land-use changes in Hamparan Perak over five- and ten-year periods. A ground check is carried out on several types of land-use to ensure the results of image interpretation that have been carried out. A change-detection analysis is made available in the geographic information system to find out changes in land-use. Trigger factors, pressures and impacts of land-use changes and the responses carried out were analysed using the DPSIR approach (driving force, pressure, state, impact, response). Based on the study results, the types of land-use that experienced an increase in area were industrial, oil palm plantations, rubber plantations, settlements, shrubs and sugarcane plantations. The types of land-use that decreased were mangrove forests, mixed gardens, open land, paddy fields and ponds. Changes in land-use impact reduced biodiversity, damaged mangroves and decreased rice production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the loss of wetlands, land‐use change, and confrontations with humans, the common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) is one of the largest land mammals currently threatened and classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The common hippo is found in protected and unprotected habitats, marshes, and inland major rivers of Ethiopia. However, little is known about the population status of hippos in the country. Hence, this study aimed to reveal the current population size of hippos and its conflicts with sugarcane plantation in Arjo‐Dhidhessa Sugar Factory. Data on population size, diet composition, and potential hippo conflicts was also collected from August 2020 to February 2021. The complete on‐foot count method was used to estimate the hippo population during the wet and dry seasons. The backtracking approach was used to determine the hippo's diet, which involved identifying and quantifying foraged species using quadrats. The total sugarcane stalk damage was counted in the sampled fields to determine sugarcane damage. Direct observation and interviews with sugarcane guards were used to identify mitigation methods employed to prevent hippo attacks. During the wet and dry seasons, a total of 96 and 182 hippos were documented in the upper Dhidhessa River, respectively. Hippos ate 23 plant species from 11 different families. The Poaceae family made up 51.32% of the hippo's diet. During the wet and dry seasons, a total of 662 (36.5%) and 1156 (63.5%) sugarcane stalks/ha were damaged, respectively. The best mitigation techniques against hippo assaults in the area were guarding, fencing, trenching, and burning fire. A sound conservation action plan for hippos along the Dhidhessa River and associated banks must be developed. Furthermore, while hippos are encircled by the Arjo‐Dhidhessa sugarcane irrigation scheme, modern mitigation measures and corridors for hippos should be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the loss of wetlands, land‐use change, and confrontations with humans, the common hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) is one of the largest land mammals currently threatened and classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The common hippo is found in protected and unprotected habitats, marshes, and inland major rivers of Ethiopia. However, little is known about the population status of hippos in the country. Hence, this study aimed to reveal the current population size of hippos and its conflicts with sugarcane plantation in Arjo‐Dhidhessa Sugar Factory. Data on population size, diet composition, and potential hippo conflicts was also collected from August 2020 to February 2021. The complete on‐foot count method was used to estimate the hippo population during the wet and dry seasons. The backtracking approach was used to determine the hippo's diet, which involved identifying and quantifying foraged species using quadrats. The total sugarcane stalk damage was counted in the sampled fields to determine sugarcane damage. Direct observation and interviews with sugarcane guards were used to identify mitigation methods employed to prevent hippo attacks. During the wet and dry seasons, a total of 96 and 182 hippos were documented in the upper Dhidhessa River, respectively. Hippos ate 23 plant species from 11 different families. The Poaceae family made up 51.32% of the hippo's diet. During the wet and dry seasons, a total of 662 (36.5%) and 1156 (63.5%) sugarcane stalks/ha were damaged, respectively. The best mitigation techniques against hippo assaults in the area were guarding, fencing, trenching, and burning fire. A sound conservation action plan for hippos along the Dhidhessa River and associated banks must be developed. Furthermore, while hippos are encircled by the Arjo‐Dhidhessa sugarcane irrigation scheme, modern mitigation measures and corridors for hippos should be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa, with highly variable and intense land-use practices, coupled with limited soil fertility and water resources, there has been a long history of encroachment of arable lands (sugarcane and timber plantations) into surrounding wetlands. Although wetland delineation within the timber and sugar sectors is well-defined in policy, and existing and proposed legislation, there are significant areas of non-compliance. The spatiallyexplicit Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) was adopted to investigate the interactions of climate, landuse and soil on the water-use of natural and encroached wetlands. This paper documents the calibration, validation and application of the SWAT model on Quaternary Catchment (QC) U20G, which is a 498 km2 catchment that forms part of the uMngeni River basin. The SWAT-CUP parameter sensitivity and optimization model was tested with daily observed streamflow data for this catchment. Parameters were modified using the sequential uncertainty fitting (SUFI-2) analysis routine to calibrate the model. The simulated flow had a close fit to the observed flow with a regression coefficient (r2) of 0.87 and a Nash-Sutcliffe (NS) coefficient of 0.8. Through the buffer scenario analysis, the model showed that if the wetland and a 20-m buffer were to be returned to a natural state, there could be a 16% increase in the annual streamflow contribution, with an upper limit of a 60% increase in some hydrologic response units (HRUs). Thus there would be a hydrological gain if wetlands and sensitive buffer areas were to be cleared of commercial timber species and sugarcane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South African jazz historiography has tended to regard Cape Town and Johannesburg as the principal axes of musical practice within the country's borders. This discourse tends to marginalize such practice in Durban as the most obviously "British colonial" of South Africa's big cities. While Durban's history has shaped its unique population, its unique demographic makeup has in turn influenced local musicking practices. This essay examines notions of diaspora under three broad headings: diasporic currents within the country, diasporic flows from "outside" (indentured labor from India for Natal's sugar plantations), and phenomenological reflections on the interwovenness of place and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of the study is to apply symmetry principles to general mathematical modelling based on multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approach for use in development in conjunction with geographic weighted regression (GWR) model and optimize the artificial neural network-cellular automaton (ANN-CA) model for forecasting the sugarcane plot burning area of Northeast Thailand. First, to calculate the service area boundaries of sugarcane transport that caused the burning of sugarcane with a fire radiative power (FRP) values using spatial correlation analysis approach. Second, the analysis of the spatial factors influencing sugarcane burning. The study uses the approach of symmetry in the design of algorithm for finding the optimal service boundary distance (called as cut-off) in the analysis of hot-spot clustering and uses calculations with the geographic information system (GIS) approach, and the final stage is the use of screened independent variable factors to predict the plots of burned sugarcane in 2031. The results showed that the positively related factors for the percentage of cane plot sintering in the sub-area units of each sugar plant's service were the distance to transport sugarcane plots index and percentage of sugarcane plantations in service areas, while the negative coefficients were FRP differences and density of sugarcane yield factors, according to the analysis with a total of seven spatial variables. The best GWR models display local R2 values at levels of 0.902 to 0.961 in the service zones of Khonburi and Saikaw. An influential set of independent variables can increase the accuracy of the ANN-CA model in forecasting with kappa statistical estimates in the range of 0.81 to 0.85 The results of the study can be applied to other regions of Thailand, including countries with similar sugarcane harvesting industries, to formulate policies to reduce the exposure of sugarcane harvested by burning methods and to support the transportation of sugarcane within the appropriate scope of service so that particulate matter less than 2.5 microns ( PM 2.5 ) can be reduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Obtaining soil water content and soil workability data using remote sensing technology with passive sensors has some limitations due to cloud cover, cloud shadow, haze and smoke. This study proposes a method for computing soil water content and soil workability over large areas, faster and in near real-time based on Sentinel-1A (SAR) data. Sample data collected from sugarcane plantations in the Kediri and Sidoarjo districts in East Java, Indonesia, were used to develop a mathematical model of the proposed method using multi-polynomial regression. The performance indicators of the model (RMSE, MAPE and accuracy) were calculated with the results of RMSE = 0.213 and 0.250, MAPE = 16.39% and 18.79%, and accuracy = 83.6% and 81.2% for the training and testing models, respectively. The distribution of soil water content and soil workability can be computed and visualized using a spatial map. The future contribution of this work is to develop a decision support system for the selection of appropriate machinery for sugarcane field operations based on the principles of precision agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Pontal do Paranapanema is a conflictive territory composed of public lands but appropriated through falsified documentation that are the source of disputes between landowners, sugar-cane agribusiness groups and movements fighting for agrarian reform. The process of sugarcane expansion in the region led to the "enclosure" of the reform agrarian settlements by sugarcane plantations. Because of various difficulties, or even to obtain resources to improve their lands, settled workers have sought jobs in the sugar-cane mills. Currently, the sugarcane harvest is at an advanced stage of mechanisation, a fact that has repercussions on the different functions performed by the workers and on the risks in the work environment. To better understand these processes, we conducted interviews with people involved in mechanized work in the sugarcane sector and used interviews from the DataCETAS database. The results of the research show that the mechanization of cane cutting may have provided an improvement in working conditions, but the intense work and frenetic pace imposed on workers in order to increase labour productivity produce various risk agents in the work environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work was carried out with the objective of determining the spatial and temporal distribution of Albizia procera (Roxb.) Benth species in sugarcane areas in Cuba. For this purpose, the information contained in the database generated by the weed identification surveys carried out in the period 2016-2020 by the Integral Weed Control Service (SERCIM) of the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Caña de Azúcar (INICA) was used. The surveys were conducted by the visual method, walking the field along its diagonals, with the use of manuals or catalogs in digital or printed format. The magnitude of the infestation was evaluated through the frequency and area infested. The results showed that in the period 2016-2020 the species presented frequency values in the Accidental category, with an increasing trend. The highest frequency was found in the western region and the largest plagued area in the central region. The surveys evidenced the presence of this species in all stages of development and harvest cycles of sugarcane. It is recommended that a management strategy be developed to help reduce infested areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of proposals have tried to account for the genesis and development of a set of Afro-Hispanic language varieties, the vernaculars that formed in Latin America from the contact between African languages and Spanish in colonial times (Sessarego 2021). This article presents a sociohistorical and linguistic analysis of Loíza Spanish (LS), an Afro-Puerto Rican vernacular spoken in Loíza, Puerto Rico by the descendants of the Africans brought to this Caribbean island in colonial times to work as slaves on sugarcane plantations. This article assesses the evolution of this variety and its implications for creole studies. In so doing, it contributes to the long-lasting debate on the reasons behind the paucity of Spanish-based creoles in the Americas (Granda 1968 et seq.). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]