Sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum)

Saccharum officinarum, commonly called sugarcane, is a tall perennial grass of the tribe Andropogoneae that grows two to seven meters high with fibrous, sucrose-rich stalks and is the principal species cultivated for sugar production. It is native to New Guinea, where Papuan peoples first domesticated it around six thousand years ago, and it spread through Southeast Asia and Polynesia before Austronesian sailors and later traders carried it worldwide, reaching India and southern China by 500 BC, where Persian and Greek visitors marveled at a plant said to make honey without bees. Sugarcane is today the world largest crop by production quantity, with 1.9 billion tonnes harvested in 2020, and Brazil alone accounts for about forty percent of that output. Beyond raw sugar, which sugarcane supplies for roughly seventy nine percent of the world total, the crop is used for animal feed, its fibrous bagasse for energy, and its juice for ethanol fuel.