# Plantation economies and the African presence  
The Old World tropical staples that had defined the culture behind African food systems for thousands of years are evident from early on in New World plantation societies. They are manifest even when those who documented  
them were unaware of their true provenance. These plants appear in tropical America as sugar-cane planters began to substitute Africans for their decimated Amerindian labour forces. Within a decade of Hispaniola's founding in 1493 as the first European settlement in the Americas, efforts were under way to plant sugar cane. The suitability of the island's tropical climate for hosting an immensely profitable commodity encouraged plantation development. Spanish colonists initially forced the native Taino population to work on their behalf, but slave labour and the diseases that the colonists introduced took a devastating toll on the Amerindian population. By 1510, a discernible shift was under way in the plantation workforce as colonists turned to Africa for labour. In 1518, Spain authorized the direct importation from Guinea of 4,000 Africans to Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico. More than 150,000 Africans had been brought to Spanish America by 1600 (Galloway, 1989; Sweet, 2003, p. 15). The ability to impose such a labour system proved decisive in metastasizing a production system based on African slavery - one that would define plantation agriculture in the colonial empires of the Americas for more than 300 years.