How does sugar effect our enviornment?

When most people think of sugar, they typically think good things: sweet, delicious, candy, etc.  However, sugar can actually have some bad effects on our enviornment.  I honestly never would have guessed this could be true.

A sugar cane farm.

Image source:

http://www.abc.net.au/tropic/stories/Photo_of_c_m1111305.jpg

Sugar production is surprisingly pretty harmful to our environment.  It is responsible for our environment’s loss of biodiversity more than any other plant.  There are several reasons for this, which include: “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.”  Also, there is about 121 countries that produce sugar, and around 145 million tons of sugar is produced from these countries every year.  This is a lot of sugar production and a lot of places for all of these harmful things to happen to our environment.  As you can see sugar may not be so sweet after all.

As some of you may know, the Great Barrier Reef is just the coast of Australia.  It is the biggest coral reef in the world.  The reef is greatly effected by climate change and global warming and it is also very sensitive to the effects that sugar production can have.  “Waters around the reef 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.”  Also, many of the world’s greatest rivers, such as the Niger and the Zambazei, are being effected by sugar production.  They are being dried up because all of the sugar plantations are draining them out in order to water their sugar crop.  In Florida, much of the everglades are being destroyed as well because of sugar production.  “Tens of thousands of acres of the Everglades have been converted from teeming sub-tropical forest to lifeless marshland due to excessive fertilizer run-off and drainage for irrigation.”

The Great Barrier Reef

Image source:

http://www.the-great-barrier-reef-experience.com/image-files/great-barrier-reef.jpg

So, who’s to blame for the massive amount of sugar production?  Well, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) the biggest contributors to the problem are Europe and the U.S.  “The world has a growing appetite for sugar,” says Elizabeth Guttenstein of the World Wildlife Fund. “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.”  Europe and the U.S. have been producing so much because of how profitable they have been from sugar production, but they need to cut back in order to save the environment.

The Florida Everglades

Image Source: (AP Photo/Phil Sandlin)

As I was reading this article, I was so shocked and I kept thinking to myself what could be done to solve this problem, because it’s not really like we can live without sugar.  However, we can definitely cut back on the excessive amount that we have been producing just to make a profit.  I was glad to read at the end of the article that in the Florida Everglades there is a restoration effort in place in order to try and get the beautiful everglades back to their usual state.  This is something that most people may not be as aware of, especially since climate change is what’s on most people’s minds these days.  However, it is still important that we give this the attention it deserves and try to fix the problems that overproduction of sugar has done to our environment.

Source:

http://environment.about.com/od/pollution/a/sugar.htm