VOLUME
The world produces 180 million tonnes of Sugar annually. (For comparison, the world produces ~800 million tonnes of wheat annually). And sugar is not the only sweetner.
Brazil produces 23% of the world's sugar ~43 million tonnes, followed by India at 19% with 35 million tonnes.
In terms of consumption, India is the highest consumer of sugar on overall tonnage (32 million tonnes), next is Brazil with 16.5 million tonnes. Though on a per capita basis, some of the developed world counts as the highest sugar consumption daily average.
Per Capita Consumption
A couple of directional data on per capita consumption. Different data, perhaps not easily measured, based on the food retailed perhaps - more a factor of availability. Just as a directional indicator
International Trade in Sugar - Volume
Following table indicates the trading patterns in Sugar. Given the high production, Brazil is the largest exporter of sugar globally with 34.5 million tonnes exported (out of its total production of 45 million tonnes). Indonesia, China are largest importers importing ~5-5.5 million tonnes annually.
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Sugar Cane Production
Sugar production is foreseen to expand due to, among other things, the flexibility of sugar mills to shift between sugar and ethanol production, which reduces the investment risks. Sugarcane accounts for around 86% of the sugar crops and sugar beet makes up for the remainder. Sugarcane is a perennial crop that grows mainly in the tropical and sub-tropical regions. The same plants can be harvested for several years, although yields decline over time. In addition to sugar and ethanol, sugarcane can also be used to produce derivatives such as electricity (through bagasse surplus) and bioplastics. However, it remains a water-intensive crop. Conversely, sugar beet is an annual crop, cultivated mostly in temperate zones. This crop is used to produce a wide range of products, including food (sugar), feed, bio-based products for the industry (pharmaceuticals, plastics, textiles, and chemicals), and ethanol. Over the outlook period, the increase in the production of sugarcane is foreseen to come from higher yields and area expansion. Brazil will continue to be the main producer of sugar and sugarcane-based ethanol, producing 39% of the world's sugarcane by 2029. This sugarcane will be used for 18% of global sugar production and 90% of global sugarcane-based ethanol production (compared to 17% and 91% during the base period).
Brazil produces ~782 million tonnes of sugarcane, and India 490 million tonnes. (This number used to be 59 million tonnes in 1961 for Brazil, and 110 million tonnes for India in 1961. In 1961, the world produced 51 million tonnes of Sugar against current 180 million tonnes)
In terms of sugarcane production though, Brazil is significantly higher since a lot of sugarcane there is used for ethanol.
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BRAZIL & Sugar
A deeper look at the largest producer, Brazil.
Brazil - 29.4% of total land is crop and pasture land. (21.1% pasture land, 8.2% agricultural land).
Sugar cane land represents 1.2% of Brazil's territory.
Sugar cane is one of the most important crops in Brazil, accounting for more than 10 % of the national agricultural production value in 2022.
The state of São Paulo is the largest producer, accounting for around half of the Brazilian sugar cane output. Minas Gerais and Goiás follow, ranking second and third, respectively.
Sugar cane is used for Sugar and Ethanol. Additionally, sugar cane juice is used to produce cachaça, a distilled spirit which is the main ingredient in Brazil's famous Caipirinha.
History of Sugar in Brazil
Still, trying to understand the significant growth of Brazil in 2000s in the sugar industry, it seems that it has been so throughout for other agricultural commodities as well for Brazil during that decade.
Brazil is the largest country in terms of arable land, a top-5 producer of 34 agricultural commodities, and the largest agricultural net exporter. Its size and standing as a major supplier of commodities around the world and competitiveness in commodity markets suggest potential for continued growth in the agricultural sector.
Since the mid-2000s, Brazil has accelerated its transformation from an exporter of mainly tropical agricultural products such as coffee, sugar, citrus, and cacao to a major global supplier of commodities, including soybeans, grains, cotton, ethanol, and meats.
Key factors:
Factors driving Brazil’s transformation include agricultural research that has increased yields, expansion of the arable land base, large investments in production technologies to develop crop and forage varieties, and increased global demand for food and animal feed, particularly over the last decade. Most important, Brazil’s ability to harvest two to three crops a year in the same plot of land makes it unique compared with other grain and soybean-producing countries. Other factors include export-oriented macroeconomic policies, extended periods of depreciation for Brazil’s currency (the real), crop-specific agricultural policy incentives, improved sanitary controls, acquisition of foreign competitors, and a growing multinational presence and foreign investment in the country.
And hence:
Further, the push for ethanol pushed the sugarcane industry in Brazil:
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Sugar Prices
Even though sugar prices have risen in recent years, they have had a long-term downward trend and are very volatile. The relatively low cost of producing sugar in the leading exporting countries is one reason why sugar is cheap. Sugar is also frequently traded at less than the costs of production.
Sugar is grown by millions of smallscale farmers. However, its supply is controlled by a huge and complex web of transnational millers, refiners, traders and processors with operations across the world.
Sugar price
Sugar cost of production
If you compare the two charts above, one can see that perhaps only Brazil has cost of production lower than the sugar prices.
Perhaps that's why:
"The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. The United States sugar industry receives as much as $4 billion in annual subsidies in the form of price supports, guaranteed crop loans, tariffs and regulated imports of foreign sugar, which by some estimates is about half the price per pound of domestic sugar." (2019)
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History
The history of ‘White Gold’ is a reminder that even the mundane things in our kitchen cupboards, snuck into our food, and passing through the tedious stages of government quota consultations, are deeply tied up in the threads of exploitation that run throughout our food system – those of the past and the ones we’re still untangling today.
Sugar, which has become a necessary commodity almost has been one of the drivers of history.
None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.
For thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. “The true Age of Sugar had begun — and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, “Sugar Changed the World.” Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies — Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others — countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.
“White gold” drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of their North American colonies. “There was direct trade among the colonies and between the colonies and Europe, but much of the Atlantic trade was triangular: enslaved people from Africa; sugar from the West Indies and Brazil; money and manufactures from Europe,” writes the Harvard historian Walter Johnson in his 1999 book, “Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.” “People were traded along the bottom of the triangle; profits would stick at the top.”
Here's a historical look at sugar prices:
This saccharine decadence fell out of style among the British elite. But sugar consumption soon took off anyway with the rise in popularity of bitter drinks like coffee and tea. Sweetened with sugar and increasingly available, they entered the daily routines of a growing fraction of British society, which could consume them in the burgeoning number of coffee houses popping up across London.To satisfy rising demand, European powers sent African slaves to their West Indian colonies, extracting 12 million tonnes of sugar—and destroying countless human lives—between 1690 and 1790. This was the infamous ‘triangle trade,’ where Europeans sent manufactured goods to Africa, slaves were sent from Africa to the West Indies, and the West Indies sent commodities like sugar to Europe.Disagreements over sugar taxation in this web of trade were an important driver of tensions between Britain and its American colonies that ultimately led to war.During the American Civil War, domestic sugar supplies crashed as slaves abandoned Louisiana sugar plantations. With over one tenth of the world’s sugar supply taken offline due to the war, and the failure of the French beet sugar crop, prices spiked from 7¢/lb in 1861 to over 20¢ in 1864.While the institution of slavery was destroyed by the Union army in the US, it persisted in Cuba. But Cuban slaves’ fortunes soon turned, as a plantation owner fed up with Spanish colonial rule freed his slaves and revolted, starting a war that would last ten years and result in the emancipation of slaves over the coming decades. In the spring of 1869, speculators took advantage of this upheaval by attempting to corner the sugar market, predicting that the conflict would decimate the animals used to harvest and process Cuban sugar.
[[//Then there are other areas as well affected by sugar and colonial pursuits. After slavery was abolished, indenture systems came in place to provide cheap labour. This led to displacement, emigration -
The Indian indenture system was a system of indentured servitude, by which more than 1.6 million workers[1] from British India were transported to labour in European colonies as a substitute for slave labour, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century. The system expanded after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833,[2] in the French colonies in 1848, and in the Dutch Empire in 1863. British Indian indentureship lasted until the 1920s. This resulted in the development of a large South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean,[3] Natal (South Africa), Réunion, Mauritius, and Fiji, as well as the growth of Indo-South African, Indo-Caribbean, Indo-Mauritian and Indo-Fijian populations.
On 18 January 1826, the Government of the French Indian Ocean island of Réunion laid down terms for the introduction of Indian labourers to the colony. Each man was required to appear before a magistrate and declare that he was going voluntarily. This agreement is known as girmit[6] and it outlined a period of five years labour in the colonies with pay of 8 rupees per month (about $4 in 1826) and rations, provided labourers had been transported from Pondicherry and Karaikal.
The Indian indenture system was put in place initially at the behest of sugar planters in colonial territories, who hoped the system would provide reliable cheap labour similar to the conditions under slavery.[7] The new system was expected to demonstrate the superiority of "free" over slave labour in the production of tropical products for imperial markets.
For more, perhaps VS Naipaul.]]
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Plantation System
The geographic center of sugar cane cultivation shifted gradually across the world over a span of 3,000 years from India to Persia, along the Mediterranean to the islands near the coast of Africa and then the Americas, before shifting back across the globe to Indonesia. A whole new kind of agriculture was invented to produce sugar – the so-called Plantation System. In it, colonists planted large acreages of single crops which could be shipped long distances and sold at a profit in Europe. To maximize the productivity and profitability of these plantations, slaves or indentured servants were imported to maintain and harvest the labor-intensive crops. Sugar cane was the first to be grown in this system, but many others followed including coffee, cotton, cocoa, tobacco, tea, rubber, and most recently oil palm.
The people in New Guinea were among the most inventive agriculturalists the world has known. They domesticated a broad range of local plant species including not only sugar cane but also taro, bananas, yam, and breadfruit.
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A related discussion is sugar and general health. A few notes:
What helps in terms of policies (basis various public health policies across different countries). It works by influencing:-how available sugar and sugary products are - reducing availability in places like school canteen, retail environments, and in food supply by reformualtion- how affordable they are - for example, soda taxes- how acceptable sugar and its alternatives are perceived to be - making water a preferred drink. Free fruit/veg a couple of times in shcools- how aware we are of sugar in products - packaging clearly, front label
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Open - market size, key players, other sweetners. Islands affected.
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