The Persians and Greeks encountered the famous "reeds that produce honey without bees" in India between the sixth and fourth centuries BC.

The need for sugar crop laborers became a major driver of large migrations, some people voluntarily accepting indentured servitude[5] and others forcibly imported as slaves.

The young, unexpanded flower head of Saccharum edule (duruka) is eaten raw, steamed, or toasted, and prepared in various ways in Southeast Asia, such as certain island communities of Indonesia as well as in Oceanic countries like Fiji.

[citation needed] Sugarcane, a perennial tropical grass, exhibits a unique growth pattern characterized by lateral shoots emerging at its base, leading to the development of multiple stems.

As these stems mature, they evolve into cane stalks, constituting a substantial portion of the entire plant, accounting for roughly 75% of its composition.

[citation needed] A fully mature cane stalk generally comprises a composition of around 11–16% fiber, 12–16% soluble sugars, 2–3% nonsugar carbohydrates, and 63–73% water content.

The successful cultivation of sugarcane hinges on a delicate interplay of several factors, including climatic conditions, soil properties, irrigation methods, fertilization practices, pest and disease management, the selection of specific varieties, and the timing of the harvest.

[16][17][15][18][19] From Insular Southeast Asia, S. officinarum was spread eastward into Polynesia and Micronesia by Austronesian voyagers as a canoe plant by around 3,500 BP.

[21][22][23][24] Around the eighth century, Muslim and Arab traders introduced sugar from medieval India to the other parts of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, and Andalusia.

From there, the technique spread east towards China, and west towards Persia and the early Islamic worlds, eventually reaching the Mediterranean in the 13th century.

In colonial times, sugar formed one side of the triangle trade of New World raw materials, along with European manufactured goods, and African slaves.

Christopher Columbus first brought sugarcane to the Caribbean (and the New World) during his second voyage to the Americas, initially to the island of Hispaniola (modern day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).

Toil in the sugar plantations became a main basis for a vast network of forced population movement, supplying people to work under brutal coercion.

[30] The migrations to serve sugarcane plantations led to a significant number of ethnic Indians, Southeast Asians, and Chinese people settling in various parts of the world.

Sugarcane plantations and Asian ethnic groups continue to thrive in countries such as Fiji, South Africa, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Martinique, French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, St. Croix, Suriname, Nevis, and Mauritius.

Sugarcane remains an important part of the economy of Cuba, Guyana, Belize, Barbados, and Haiti, along with the Dominican Republic, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, and other islands.

Sugarcane is cultivated in the tropics and subtropics in areas with a plentiful supply of water for a continuous period of more than 6–7 months each year, either from natural rainfall or through irrigation.

[38] 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.

In a country with a mechanical agriculture looking for a high production of large fields, as in North America, sugarcanes are replanted after two or three harvests to avoid a lowering yields.

Austoft also developed a series of hydraulic high-lift infield transporters to work alongside its harvesters to allow even more rapid transfer of cane to, for example, the nearest railway siding.

[50] Unlike legumes and other nitrogen-fixing plants that form root nodules in the soil in association with bacteria, G. diazotrophicus lives within the intercellular spaces of the sugarcane's stem.

[53] At least 20,000 people are estimated to have died of chronic kidney disease in Central America in the past two decades, most of them sugarcane workers along the Pacific coast.

This occurs during the process of cutting the sugarcane manually, causing physical ailments due to constant repetitive movements for hours every work day.

[56][57] Refineries, often located nearer to consumers in North America, Europe, and Japan, then produce refined white sugar, which is 99% sucrose.

[69][71] This has altered the amount of water reaching aquatic habitats, and has contributed to the degradation of ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef and Indus Delta.

[69] Sugarcane processing produces a wide variety of pollutants, including heavy metals and bagasse, which can be released into the environment through wastewater discharge.

The production of ethanol from sugarcane is more energy efficient than from corn or sugar beets or palm/vegetable oils, particularly if cane bagasse is used to produce heat and power for the process.

The reason for this reduction is that the stalks are separated from the leaves (which are burned and whose ashes are left in the field as fertilizer), and from the roots that remain in the ground to sprout for the next crop.

One hectare of sugar cane yields 4,000 litres of ethanol per year (without any additional energy input, because the bagasse produced exceeds the amount needed to distill the final product).

[77] In most countries where sugarcane is cultivated, several foods and popular dishes are derived directly from it, such as: In the 21st century, it is estimated that sugar is potentially responsible for approximately 20% of the caloric content of modern diets.