Sweet Success

Along with a national flag and a national airline, a sweet tooth seems to be one of the first things developed by the world's new nations. Because the desire for sweets goes hand in hand with rising expectations, the worldwide sugar industry is undergoing its greatest expansion in history. Practically every sugar nation is planting new cane and beet sugar, increasing its present yields and putting up new plants that turn out not only sugar but such valuable byproducts as paper, plastics, hardboard and tiles. Result: world sugar production this year will climb to more than 65.7 million tons, an alltime record.

Trouble with Hippos. Sugar consumption varies from the African bush-man's 3.7 Ibs. per year to the tea-and taffy-loving Briton's 116 Ibs., but it is rising everywhere, has now reached a worldwide record of 38 Ibs. annually per person. The Dutch set up a sugar industry for Ethiopia, where coffee was traditionally seasoned with salt and spices, and so converted the Ethiopians to sweetness that they have now become modest exporters of sugar. Turkey has also become an exporter, and so has Bolivia, which ran up a 22,000-ton surplus last year and is trying to teach its Indian population to like sugar. Chile now saves $20 million annually by refining domestic sugar beets, has also fattened its cattle industry by feeding livestock the refinery residue.

With Polish equipment and American technical assistance, Iran is setting up a sugar industry, plans to grow and process all its own sugar by 1968. Rhodesian farmers have cleared 75,000 acres in the humid Hippo Valley lowlands of elephants, lions, buffalo and the tsetse fly in order to plant sugar. They still have not solved one problem: at night, hippopotamuses clomp out of the nearby Zambesi River, bed down on tender sugar shoots and crush them. Even the world's longtime sugar producers are working to fatten yields. Brazil, where sugar has grown in the north for 400 years, is converting many unprofitable coffee areas to sugar in the southern states of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Parana, and Mexico has built 71 mills, including the world's biggest one at Vera Cruz. The Philippine Republic has turned so much land to sugar production that a rice shortage has developed.

Gin to Explosives. The increase in sugar production has produced some sour with the sweet. Exceptional harvests all around the world will create a 4.4 million-ton surplus this year; prices have toppled from 11.18-c- per Ib. only last month to last week's 2.20-c-. Two companies operated by Julio Lobo, the world's foremost sugar buyer, recently went bankrupt by banking on a rising market. The situation is complicated by Castro's Cuba, whose crop this year is expected to rebound to 5 million tons. Russia, the world's largest grower (from sugar beets), takes a big share of Cuba's crop in return for machinery and other aid, then dumps much of it on the world market. Meantime the U.S., which no longer buys Cuban sugar, has sharply increased its own production, quintupling Florida's cane production in three years.

Though it means trouble for many, the increase in acreage is good news for the builders of sugar mills. The four West German firms that specialize in sugar machinery have sold $300 million worth; India alone buys five new German mills yearly. Hawaii's Honolulu Iron Works, one of the world's largest makers of integrated sugar mills, has orders from as far away as Nepal and Pakistan. These sugar mills produce a good deal more than sugar--one fact that gives some hope for ending the glut. Bagasse, the residue after cane is squeezed, can be converted into hardboard and tile. Sugar cane also provides a base for paper, plastics, synthetic rubber, toothpaste, fingernail polish, floor wax, toys, even explosives.

In the U.S., experiments are well along to make auto-headlight glass from sugar and to substitute sugar for the fats in soap detergents; sugar dissolves easily, does not cause water pollution. And, quite beyond these uses, sugar has one major value that no nation dare ignore: from the rum and cachaza of Brazil to Indonesian Arak, it is the universal base for alcoholic drinks. In Peru, where a drop in the U.S. import quota has caused a 220,000-ton sugar surplus, W. R. Grace & Co. intends to solve a national economic crisis in an ingenious way: Grace will use the excess to make, under license, Smirnoff vodka and Gordon's gin.

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