Greening the sugar industry

For generations, sugarcane production was a brutal endeavor, employing low-wage and slave labor to cut cane by hand, soaking the earth in chemicals, destroying animal habitats, polluting water and blanketing the sky with smoke from epic fires used to clear fields between harvests.

The World Wildlife Fund stated in a 2004 report that sugarcane production has caused "a greater loss of biodiversity on the planet than any other single crop."

Once a luxury enjoyed only by royal and noble classes, sugar is no longer the food of the rich, but the plague of the poor. The American Heart Association estimates that each American consumes an average of 22 teaspoons of sugar per day, most of it in the form of soda and other processed foods.

In the natural products industry, it’s tempting to dismiss such a statistic as "not our problem," but a quick scan of the labels on your shelves reveals that sugar—whether it’s granulated, raw, brown or evaporated cane juice—is everywhere.

But what if the very industry that caused this environmental devastation could reverse the effects of large-scale conventional farming, improve soil quality, create clean water sources and increase biodiversity by 500 percent? In the heart of Brazil, a country that supplies more sugar to the global market than any other nation, one producer claims to be doing just that.