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Food for Peace: Agri-tectures of Sugar in The Dominican Republic, 1950-1970

Fri, May 27, 4:15 to 5:45pm, TBA

Abstract

At the height of the Cold War, between 1961 and 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s administration rebranded the U.S. Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act. While the original 1954 bill legalized the international sale and donation of domestic commodity surplus to stabilize commodities markets and farm prices at home, once rebranded, the now Food for Peace Program offered life-saving food to the world’s hungry, saleable staples to untapped international markets and immense political leverage over both allies and vacillating members of the international community. In the Dominican Republic, under dictator General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Food for Peace helped fund a proliferation of industrial architecture, built to handle escalated harvests made possible by land redistribution and new technologies of industrial farming. Transmuting the country’s most fecund farm lands into his own private property, Trujillo, via Food for Peace, converted a small agriculturally-centered island into a biological and industrial factory for the production of a single, saccharine monoculture: sugar. Tracking the development of the modern Dominican sugar complex, this paper interrogates the singular role the architecture of agricultural development played between the 1950s and the 1970s, through the lens of what Timothy Morton calls agrilogistics—the basic appropriative agriculture urge extended through and beyond plant, non-human and human animal populations—during this pivotal period in Caribbean Cold War history.

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