Whence
Sugarcane
Plant

Where does Sugarcane come from?

Sugarcane comes from New Guinea. Papuan farmers there turned a wild cane into a sweet crop thousands of years ago, and from the island it travelled across the Pacific and on to Asia, long before it reached the plantations of the Caribbean and Brazil.

A sweet grass from New Guinea

Cultivated sugarcane, Saccharum officinarum, was bred by Papuans in New Guinea and the nearby islands from a wild cane, Saccharum robustum. A 2025 genome study led by the French research centre CIRAD confirmed this origin and dated it to around 8,000 years ago. Papuans and Austronesians first grew sugarcane mainly as food for their domesticated pigs. New Guinea and its neighbouring islands are still the crop's centre of diversity.

Carried by canoe and trade

From New Guinea the cane spread west to the islands of Southeast Asia, where it crossed with another wild cane, Saccharum spontaneum. Austronesian voyagers carried it east into Polynesia and Micronesia as a canoe plant by around 3,500 years ago, and traders took it to China and India by around 3,000 years ago. In India, Alexander the Great's admiral Nearchus reported reeds that 'produce honey, although there are no bees', as the geographer Strabo recorded.

Why people think of the Caribbean

Sugarcane is tied to the Caribbean and Brazil by what Europeans did with it much later. Christopher Columbus brought it to Hispaniola on his second voyage, and the first sugar harvest there came in 1501. The Portuguese took it to Brazil. In colonial times sugar was one side of the triangle trade, along with European manufactured goods and enslaved Africans. Today Brazil grows more cane than any other country: 38% of the world's crop in 2022.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · cirad.fr ↗ · penelope.uchicago.edu ↗ · etymonline.com ↗

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