In times of drought, sugar beet is economically more viable than sugarcane

Our school geography masters told all of us that there are two main sources of sugar — sugarcane and sugar beet. Sugarcane was the preferred crop in India, Brazil, West Indies, and sugar beet was the preferred crop in Europe and the rest of the world. All of us thus believe that sugarcane is for us and sugar beet is some foreign crop. This thought process can be forgiven when water is plentiful, dams and irrigation canals are full, groundwater is there for the asking, aquifers are full, water table is high, electricity can be given to farmers free to let them pump out as much water as they need.

The problem with sugarcane is that it is probably the most thirsty crop in the world and the most wasteful in terms of irrigation, using perhaps 25-30 times as much water for irrigation compared to sugar beet. India must seriously think of alternatives for production of sugar when parts of India are facing severe drought, groundwater is fast depleting, dams are dry, people are dying, and farmers are committing suicide.

Sugarcane, they say, is the lazy farmers’ crop. You plant the cane which takes a year to grow, you ensure the field always remains flooded, and gaze at the crop for a year. In a year or two, the ratoon crop grows and the same sequence is followed. You have flooded the fields for two years running with scarce irrigation water, much of which is wasted, to the detriment of the rest of the community and of all other crops, and your land is spoken for two years. Sugar beet, on the other hand,  needs a fraction of the water used for cane, the crop ripens in four months compared to one or two years for cane,  the beet has a 16 per cent sugar content compared to 11 per cent in the best cane grown in India, your land is free for at least six months to grow any other crop that brings you a profit, for example pulses which will also fix nitrogen into the soil and save foreign exchange needed to import pulses (or onions!), the spacing of the crop in the field is amenable to drip irrigation which will reduce water use even further, the leaves and residual pulp from the beet are excellent fodder for cattle. We talk about doubling farm income, and here is a method to achieve it. 

I was personally involved with work on sugar beet in the early 1980s because the company I worked for, ICI, (Imperial Chemical Industries) had a serious interest in alternative sources of alcohol from distilleries not based on sugarcane, to be used as ethanol feedstock, because West Bengal had no sugarcane crop worth the name. We needed five lakh litres of alcohol per day to run our polythene plant at Rishra, West Bengal. Since alcohol is a state subject, we were dependent on the tender mercies of other states to get our feedstock.  This was not always forthcoming, and we had to try and use political influence to get alcohol to keep our plant running.

 At that time Ramakrishna Mission, Narendrapur, was experimenting with crops that could grow in the increasingly saline soil in parts of South 24 Parganas bordering the Sundarbans, where because of soil salinity in some areas even paddy would not grow. They hit upon sugar beet, which grew very well in this high salinity, tropical environment. ICI took up this initiative in the hope of getting a source of alcohol not based on sugarcane. With our Managing Director Dr Subrata Ganguly’s and then Chief Minister Jyoti Basu’s help,  the West Bengal Government set up the Sugar Beet Corporation which confirmed all these findings. However, this effort closed down because the sugar lobby in the rest of India was too powerful, too well connected politically, and felt no need to change from sugarcane because water for irrigation was not a problem. There were also no entrepreneurs in West Bengal prepared to enter this field. So, many of us Calcutta bhadralok added sweet sugar beet to our salads for many months because there was no other use for this wonder crop! Interestingly, sugar mills in Ganganagar, Rajasthan, used sugar beet for several years to extend the sugar season when sugar prices were high.

There is plenty of experience in India on sugar beet. In West Bengal we got the seeds and technical support from the Agricultural Institute at Naini in Allahabad. The Indian Sugar Mills’ Association and various other sugar industry associations have done work on beet and confirmed its efficacy, but evidence indicates that perhaps the sugar lobby stopped all this work in several institutes for fear of having to venture into a new area away from their comfort zone. Is there a parallel to be drawn with the cotton mill owners in Mumbai who refused to upgrade their equipment leading to some grave consequences for them and their workers in the 1980s?

There is still a misconception in India that sugar beet is a European crop that cannot grow in India. Yet there is enough evidence on the ground that sugar beet can and is grown in parts of India. Newspaper reports suggest that India may have to import sugar next year because the shortage of water in parts of India will affect the sugarcane crop. Significantly, all this information is available with sugar institutes in India, based on the work they have already done.  

 The extraction of sugar from beet does not need rocket science — the whole of Europe does it. It is a soft crop similar to fruit and thus easier to process than cane which requires drastic crushing. Using sugar beet, the sugar lobby and sugar mills can continue to be as powerful and influential as they are, perhaps more so because they have the option of taking sugar plus one other crop (pulses? onions?) under their wing. They say people only change when circumstances force them to do so, and the present and continuing water famine is an ideal opportunity for change.

You can judge your age by the amount of time it takes you to accept a new idea.
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The writer, a retired corporate executive, volunteers with the Friends of the Doon Society and the John Martyn Memorial Trust school​