Dear “Earth Talk”: What is the
environmental impact of sugar, aside from its not-so-healthy aspects?
I’ve heard that the industry is no friend to the environment. —
Mary Oakes, via e-mail
Sugar is ever-present in products we consume every
day, yet we rarely give a second thought as to how and where it is produced
and what toll it may take on the environment. According to the World Wildlife Fund, roughly 145
million tons of sugar is produced in 121 countries each year. And sugar
production does indeed take its toll on surrounding soil, water, and air,
especially in threatened tropical ecosystems near the equator. A 2004
report by WWF, titled Sugar and the
Environment, shows that sugar may be
responsible for more biodiversity loss than any other crop because of its
destruction of habitat to make way for plantations, its intensive use of
water for irrigation, its heavy use of agricultural chemicals, and the
polluted wastewater that is routinely discharged in the sugar-production
process. One extreme example of environmental destruction by
the sugar industry is the Great Barrier Reef, off Australia. Its waters
suffer from large quantities of effluents, pesticides, and sediment from
sugar farms, and the reef itself is threatened by the clearing of land,
which has destroyed the wetlands that are an integral part of the
reef’s ecology. Meanwhile, in Papua New Guinea, soil fertility has
declined by about 40 percent over the last three decades in heavy
sugarcane-cultivation regions. And some of the world’s mightiest
rivers — including the Niger in West Africa, the Zambezi in southern
Africa, the Indus in Pakistan, and the Mekong in Southeast Asia —
have nearly dried up as a result of water-intensive sugar production. WWF blames Europe and, to a lesser extent, the United
States, for overproducing sugar because of its profitability and resulting
large contribution to the economy. WWF and other environmental groups are
working on public-education and legal campaigns to try to reform the
international sugar trade. “The world has a growing appetite for
sugar,” says WWF’s Elizabeth Guttenstein. “Industry,
consumers, and policy-makers must work together to make sure that in
the future sugar is produced in ways that least harm the
environment.” Here in the United States the health of one of the
country’s most unique ecosystems, Florida’s Everglades, is
seriously compromised after decades of sugarcane farming. Tens of thousands
of acres of the Everglades have been converted from teeming subtropical
forest to lifeless marshland as a result of excessive fertilizer runoff and
drainage for irrigation. A tenuous agreement between environmentalists and
sugar producers under a “Comprehensive Everglades Restoration
Plan” has ceded some sugarcane land back to nature and reduced water
use and fertilizer runoff. Only time will tell whether these and other
restoration efforts will help bring back Florida’s once-teeming
“river of grass.”
For more information: WWF, www.panda.org;
Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, www.evergladesplan.org.
Send questions to “Earth Talk” in care of E/The Environmental Magazine, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; or e-mail
earthtalk@emagazine.com.
This article appears in Feb 9-15, 2006.
