Agricultural Finance by Helyette Geman

Author:Helyette Geman [Geman, Helyette]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118827376
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

8.1 Sugar

Sugar cane can be traced back to around the Southern Pacific Ocean approximately 8000 years ago. Most probably indigenous of New Guinea, sugar cane moved to Southeast Asia and India. In 100 BC, Chinese farmers were already cultivating and refining sugar cane and, by the sixth or seventh centuries, Persians traders were trading a sugar that was refined through a chemical process.

Sugar was discovered by Europeans at the very end of the 11th century. The Arabs had acquired the secret for the extraction of sugar from sugar cane after their invasion/conquest of Persia in 642. On the American continent, sugar cane was first introduced to the Caribbean during Christopher Columbus' second trip, in 1493. From the Caribbean, sugar rapidly expanded to the rest of the continent, due to the ease of its culture under this climate. Two thousand sugar mills were active in Brazil by 1540.

In the 17th century, the British began to grow sugar cane in Barbados, which by 1665 was exporting 7000 tons of sugar to England. In response to the English blockade of sugar from the Caribbean to France, Napoleon encouraged farmers to plant sugar beet and in a period of two years after Napoleon's decree supporting sugar beet production, France was producing 35,000 tons of sugar.

Sugar is a carbohydrate produced from various fruits and vegetables. There are three types of sugars: monosaccharides, disaccharides, and polyols. Examples of monosaccharides are glucose, fructose (found in fruit), and galactose (found in cows' milk). Glucose is the sugar used by the human body; its chemical formula is C6 H12 O6. Sucrose, lactose, and maltose are the three types of disaccharides, with sucrose or saccharose – C12 H22 O11 – being used as table sugar, often after being refined. Note that the ‘low calorie’ artificial sweeteners are more and more proven to be bad for the health (and quite fattening in fact).

The main sources of sugar are sugar cane and sugar beets, both plants containing sugar in large quantities. Sugar cane is a tall perennial grass growing in tropical and semi-tropical climates, which requires large amounts of water and a warm climate. It stores sugar in its stalk, and takes approximately 16 months to mature from planting. Planting is done from stalk cuttings and the plant can be cut several times, with decreasing yields after each cutting. The main constraint of sugar cane processing is that its sugar content quickly deteriorates after harvesting. Therefore, the distance between the sugar cane field and the refinery has to be optimized. Many developing countries that have correct weather conditions and land available for the planting of sugar cane currently lack the necessary infrastructure for its rapid processing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.