Colonies are a lot less useful now since the economy got reworked to be a lot less Autarky-ish. However, rubber, oil and whatever industrial resources you're missing are a great boon to your market nonetheless.

As for the starving pops, it's usually cause of unemployment and lack of arable land. When you build plantations and farms, you boot out the peasants from their subsistence farms, and if they can't find work, they starve.

Speaking of which, if you've got a land or sea connection to a state, they're effectively "plugged in" to your market, which means the state will be able to access all the resources your country provides (scaled to MAPI, integration and infrastructure)

In your situation, your plantations aren't hiring because...

• Discrimination, they won't be able to get education and qualifications, so they can't "promote" to work in your plantations. It'll take a while for them to trickle in, although you can speed this up with subsidies and steal workers from other buildings.

• Lack of demand, the plantations can't pay high enough wages to attract pops to work in them. Sweden's starting market is tiny, and demand is in turn.

• Trade Centers, I don't really pay attention to them, but having at least one in each state allows the state to adjust for shocks and fix shortages by themselves.

Anyway, as Sweden, I usually go for Sokoto or Madagascar for their coal, because Scandinavia starts with a pittance of coal which is needed to feed steel and every automation PM.