Sugarcane

Sugarcane, or sugar cane, is a tall perennial grass of the genus Saccharum whose stout, jointed stalks, two to seven metres high, store sucrose in their internodes. It is native to New Guinea, where Papuans first domesticated Saccharum officinarum, and Austronesian sailors later carried it to Polynesia, Madagascar, India and southern China. Persians and Greeks adopted its cultivation, and by the eighth century sugar was a costly spice traded across the Mediterranean. Columbus brought the plant to Hispaniola on his second voyage, and plantation sugar became bound up with the Atlantic slave trade. Grown across the tropics and subtropics, it is the world's largest crop by quantity, about 1.9 billion tonnes in 2020, with Brazil producing roughly 40 percent. Sugarcane supplies about 79 percent of the world's sugar, most of the rest coming from sugar beet, and its reeds also make pens, mats and thatch.