Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of tall, perennial grass (in the genus Saccharum, tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar production. The plants are 2–7 m (6–20 ft) tall with stout, jointed, fibrous stalks that are rich in sucrose, which accumulates in the stalk internodes. Sugarcanes belong to the grass family, Poaceae, an economically important flowering plant family that includes maize, wheat, rice, and sorghum, and many forage crops. It is native to New Guinea.
Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Austronesian and Papuan people. The best evidence available today points to the New Guinea area as the site of the original domestication of Saccharum officinarum.John N. Warner, "Sugar Cane: An Indigenous Papuan Cultigen". Ethnology, vol. 1, no. 4, 1962, pp. 405–11. It was introduced to Polynesia, Island Melanesia, and Madagascar in prehistoric times via Austronesian sailors. It was also introduced by Austronesian sailors to India and then to Southern China by 500 BC, via trade. The Persians and Greeks found "that reeds in India yield honey without bees", as said by Strabo, between the sixth and fourth centuries BC. They adopted and then spread sugarcane agriculture. By the eighth century, sugar was considered a luxurious and expensive spice from India, and merchant trading spread its use across the Mediterranean and North Africa. In the 18th century, sugarcane plantations began in the Caribbean, South American, Indian Ocean, and Pacific island nations. The need for sugar crop laborers became a major driver of large migrations, some people voluntarily accepting indentured servitude and others forcibly imported as slaves.
Grown in tropical and subtropical regions, sugarcane is the world's largest crop by production quantity, totalling 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020, with Brazil accounting for 40% of the world total. Sugarcane accounts for 79% of sugar produced globally (most of the rest is made from sugar beets). About 70% of the sugar produced comes from Saccharum officinarum and its hybrids. All sugarcane species can interbreed, and the major commercial cultivars are complex hybrids.
White sugar is produced from sugarcane in specialized mill factories. Sugarcane reeds are used to make pens, mats, screens, and thatch. The young, unexpanded flower head of Saccharum edule (duruka) is eaten raw, steamed, or toasted, and prepared in various ways in Southeast Asia, such as certain island communities of Indonesia as well as in Oceanic countries like Fiji.
Etymology The term sugarcane is a combination of two words: "sugar" and "cane". The former ultimately derives from Sanskrit शर्करा (śárkarā). As sugar was traded and spread West, this became سُكَّر (sukkar) in Arabic, saccharum or succarum in Latin, zucchero in Italian, and eventually sucre in both Middle French and Middle English. The second term "cane" began to be used alongside it as the crop was grown on plantations in the Caribbean.
Characteristics
Sugarcane, a perennial tropical grass, exhibits a unique growth pattern characterized by lateral shoots emerging at its base, leading to the development of multiple stems. These stems typically attain a height of 3 to 4 meters (approximately 10 to 13 feet) and possess a diameter of about 5 centimeters (approximately 2 inches). As these stems mature, they evolve into cane stalks, constituting a substantial portion of the entire plant, accounting for roughly 75% of its composition.
A fully mature cane stalk generally comprises a composition of around 11–16% fiber, 12–16% soluble sugars, 2–3% non-sugar carbohydrates, and 63–73% water content. The successful cultivation of sugarcane hinges on a delicate interplay of several factors, including climatic conditions, soil properties, the selection of specific varieties, and the timing of the harvest.
In terms of yield, the average production of cane stalk stands at 60–70 tonnes per hectare (equivalent to 24–28 long tons per acre or 27–31 short tons per acre) annually. However, this yield figure is not fixed and can vary significantly, ranging from 30 to 180 tonnes per hectare. This variance is contingent upon the level of knowledge applied and the approach to crop management embraced in the cultivation of sugarcane. Ultimately, the successful cultivation of this valuable crop demands a thoughtful integration of various factors to optimize its growth and productivity.
Sugarcane is a cash crop, but it is also used as livestock fodder. The sugarcane genome is one of the most complex plant genomes known, mostly due to interspecific hybridization and polyploidization.
History
The two centers of domestication for sugarcane are one for Saccharum officinarum by Papuans in New Guinea and another for Saccharum sinense by Austronesians in Taiwan and southern China. Papuans and Austronesians originally primarily used sugarcane as food for domesticated pigs. The spread of both S. officinarum and S. sinense is closely linked to the migrations of the Austronesian peoples. Saccharum barberi was cultivated in India only after the introduction of S. officinarum.
S. officinarum was first domesticated in New Guinea and the islands east of the Wallace Line by Papuans, where it is the modern center of diversity. Beginning around 6,000 BP, several strains were selectively bred from the native Saccharum robustum. From New Guinea, it spread westwards to Maritime Southeast Asia after contact with Austronesians, where it hybridized with Saccharum spontaneum.
The second domestication center is southern China and Taiwan, where S. sinense was a primary cultigen of the Austronesian peoples. Words for sugarcane are reconstructed as *təbuS or *CebuS in Proto-Austronesian, which became *tebuh in Proto-Malayo-Polynesian. It was one of the original major crops of the Austronesian peoples from at least 5,500 BP. Introduction of the sweeter S. officinarum may have gradually replaced it throughout its cultivated range in maritime Southeast Asia.
From Insular Southeast Asia, S. officinarum was spread eastward into Polynesia and Micronesia by Austronesian voyagers as a canoe plant by around 3,500 BP. It was also spread westward and northward by around 3,000 BP to China and India by Austronesian traders, where it further hybridized with S. sinense and S. barberi. From there, it spread further into western Eurasia and the Mediterranean.
The earliest known production of crystalline sugar began in northern India. The earliest evidence of sugar production comes from ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts.Watt, George (1893), The Economic Products of India, W. H. Allen & Co., Vol 6, Part II, pp. 29–30Hill, J.A. (1902), The Anglo-American Encyclopedia, Vol. 7, p. 725Luckey, Thomas D. (1973) CRC Handbook of Food Additives, 2nd edition, Furia, Thomas E. (ed.) Vol. 1, Ch. 1. p. 7. Snodgrass, Mary Ellen (2004) Encyclopedia of Kitchen History, Routledge, pp. 145–146. Around the eighth century, Muslim and Arab traders introduced sugar from medieval India to the other parts of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, and Andalusia. By the 10th century, sources state that every village in Mesopotamia grew sugarcane.Watson, Andrew (1983). Agricultural innovation in the early Islamic world. Cambridge University Press. pp. 26–27. It was among the early crops brought to the Americas by the Spanish, mainly Andalusians, from their fields in the Canary Islands, and the Portuguese from their fields in the Madeira Islands. An article on sugarcane cultivation in Spain is included in Ibn al-'Awwam's 12th-century Book on Agriculture. (pp. 365–367 (Article XLVII)
The first chemically refined sugar appeared on the scene in India about 2,500 years ago. From there, the technique spread east towards China, and west towards Persia and the early Islamic worlds, eventually reaching the Mediterranean in the 13th century. Cyprus and Sicily became important centers for sugar production.
In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods and African slaves. It was during Christopher Columbus's second voyage to the Americas that he first brought sugarcane to the Caribbean (and the New World), initially to the island of Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The first sugar harvest happened in Hispaniola in 1501; many sugar mills were constructed in Cuba and Jamaica by the 1520s. The Portuguese introduced sugarcane to Brazil. By 1540, there were 800 cane sugar mills in Santa Catarina Island and another 2,000 on the north coast of Brazil, Demarara, and Suriname.
Sugar, often in the form of molasses, was shipped from the Caribbean to Europe or New England, where it was used to make rum. The profits from the sale of sugar were then used to purchase manufactured goods, which were then shipped to West Africa, where they were bartered for slaves. The slaves were then brought back to the Caribbean to be sold to sugar planters. The profits from the sale of the slaves were then used to buy more sugar, which was shipped to Europe. Toil in the sugar plantations became a main basis for the Atlantic slave trade, supplying people to work under brutal coercion.
The passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act led to the end of slavery through most of the British Empire, and many of the emancipated slaves no longer worked on sugarcane plantations when they had a choice. West Indian planters, therefore, needed new workers, and they found cheap labour in China and India. The workers were subject to indenture, a long-established form of contract, which bound them to unfree labour for a fixed term. The conditions where the indentured servants worked were frequently abysmal, owing to a lack of care among the planters. The first ships carrying indentured labourers from India left in 1836. The migrations to serve sugarcane plantations led to a significant number of ethnic Indians, Southeast Asians, and Chinese people settling in various parts of the world. In some islands and countries, the South Asian migrants now constitute between 10 and 50% of the population. Sugarcane plantations and Asian ethnic groups continue to thrive in countries such as Fiji, South Africa, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, St. Croix, Suriname, Nevis, and Mauritius.
In the United States, sugarcane was grown by enslaved Black laborers and, after the Civil War, Chinese migrant workers on Louisiana's sugar plantations, which were started by plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue after the Haitian Revolution and the Louisiana Purchase. The first commercial sugarcane crop was produced in Louisiana in 1795 by the French Creole planter Étienne de Boré and Saint-Domingue chemist Antoine Morin. Plantation owners like the Heydels, who owned Whitney Plantation, converted their land from indigo and rice to sugar after 1795 as well. As the US's largest slave market was located in New Orleans, sugar producers used enslaved Black labor to make Louisiana the producer of almost 25% of the world's exportable sugar by 1853. Just before the Civil War, Louisiana's sugar industry was worth more than $200 million, with "more than half of that figure represent[ing] the valuation of the ownership of human beings." Enslaved laborers resisted the conditions on sugarcane plantations. During the 1811 German Coast uprising, as many as 500 enslaved workers burned sugar plantations as they marched to New Orleans. During the CivIl War, W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his Black Reconstruction, Black cane workers abandoned cane plantations and the industry essentially collapsed. Following the war, Louisiana planters engaged Chinese workers in exploitative multi-year labor contracts; these laborers lived in segregated quarters and earned 30% less than local Black laborers.