Sugarcane

The giant grass where sugar 'hides'

Sugarcane is a giant grass up to 5 metres tall, its stem full of sweet juice! The cane is crushed, the juice boiled, and out comes sugar. 80% of the world's sugar comes from this grass. Its home is New Guinea, where people chewed it 10,000 years ago. In Brazil sugarcane is even made into fuel for cars!

Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum) is a perennial grass domesticated in New Guinea 8,000 years ago; via India (500 BC — 'sharkara' gave us the word 'sugar') it reached Persia and the Arab world, and in the 15th century the Canaries and the Americas. The stem is 3–6 m with 10–20% sucrose. At 1.9 billion tonnes a year it is the world's largest crop by mass (Brazil, India, China) and supplies 80% of sugar (the rest from beet). In Brazil it makes fuel ethanol that runs half the cars; bagasse (the pulp) gives electricity and paper. Its history is dark: Caribbean and Brazilian plantations of the 16th–19th centuries drove the transatlantic slave trade. A C4 plant, hugely productive in the tropics.

Fun facts

• The word 'sugar' comes from the ancient Indian 'sharkara'.
• Sugarcane is the world's biggest crop by weight.
• In Brazil half the cars run on sugarcane alcohol.