Agave syrup sugar equivalent

Grown in tropical and subtropical regions, sugarcane agave syrup sugar equivalent the world’s largest crop by production quantity, totaling 1. It is consumed directly in confectionery, used to sweeten beverages, as a preservative in jams and conserves, as a decorative finish for cakes and pâtisserie, as a raw material in the food industry, or fermented to produce ethanol.

Sugarcane was an ancient crop of the Austronesian and Papuan people. 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. Map showing centers of origin of Saccharum officinarum in New Guinea, S. New Guinea and the islands east of the Wallace Line by Papuans, where it is the modern center of diversity.

The second domestication center is mainland southern China and Taiwan, where S. 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. The earliest known production of crystalline sugar began in northern India.

The earliest evidence of sugar production comes from ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts. 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. In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves. 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. France found its sugarcane islands so valuable that it effectively traded its portion of Canada, famously dismissed by Voltaire as “a few acres of snow”, to Britain for their return of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and St. Boiling houses in the 17th through 19th centuries converted sugarcane juice into raw sugar. These houses were attached to sugar plantations in the Western colonies. Slaves often ran the boiling process under very poor conditions.

Rectangular boxes of brick or stone served as furnaces, with an opening at the bottom to stoke the fire and remove ashes. The passage of the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act led to the abolition 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. 55,000 and 62,500 people from the South Pacific Islands to work on sugarcane plantations. Cuban sugar derived from sugarcane was exported to the USSR, where it received price supports and was ensured a guaranteed market. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet state forced the closure of most of Cuba’s sugar industry. Sugarcane remains an important part of the economy of Guyana, Belize, Barbados, and Haiti, along with the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, and other islands. A 19th-century lithograph by Theodore Bray showing a sugarcane plantation: On the right is the “white officer”, the European overseer.

Slave workers toil during the harvest. To the left is a flat-bottomed vessel for cane transportation. It is one of the most efficient photosynthesizers in the plant kingdom. 7 months each year, either from natural rainfall or through irrigation. The crop does not tolerate severe frosts. Sugarcane can be grown on many soils ranging from highly fertile, well-drained mollisols, through heavy cracking vertisols, infertile acid oxisols and ultisols, peaty histosols, to rocky andisols.