Global flows, losses, and circularity of sugar from cultivation to end users

Sugarcane is the world’s most harvested crop by mass and, together with sugar beet, accounts for about one-quarter of global agricultural biomass. Yet despite its sheer scale and well-documented environmental and health-related burdens, a comprehensive, system-wide quantification of sugar production and utilization, including biomass allocation across sectors, losses, and circularity, is lacking. Here, we present a mass-balanced analysis of sugar, tracing sugarcane and sugar beet from cultivation through processing, trade, and consumption. We find that, of 2.8 Gt per year of harvested sugar biomass on a wet basis, approximately 7% reaches human consumption, 24% is returned to agricultural systems, 17% is used for bioenergy, and 2% for feed. These uses account for about half of the biomass harvested, while the remainder is lost across the supply chain, largely due to unavoidable water evaporation. By-product reuse yields a theoretical upper-bound circularity of up to 36%. These findings highlight sugar’s cross-sectoral role and the need to reconsider its use.