INDIA'S SUGAR EXPORTS

One not-so-talked-about success story in recent years is of sugar exports from India. Between 2017-18 and 2021-22, these have soared from $810.9 million to $4.6 billion and could cross $5.5 billion  or Rs 45,000 crore  in the fiscal year ending March 31

2.Grades of Sugar

• Raw sugar is what mills produce after the first crystallisation of juice obtained from crushing of cane
• This sugar is rough and brownish in colour, with an ICUMSA value of 600-1,200 or higher
• ICUMSA, short for the International Commission for Uniform Methods of Sugar Analysis, is a measure of the purity of sugar based on colour

• Raw sugar is processed in refineries for removal of impurities and de-colourisation. The end product is refined white cane sugar having a standard ICUMSA value of 45
• The sugar used by industries such as pharmaceuticals has ICUMSA of less than 20
• Till 2017-18, India hardly exported any raw sugar. It mainly shipped plantation white sugar with 100-150 ICUMSA value
• This was referred to as low-quality whites or LQW in international markets

3. From refined to raw

• There was a mission started around 2018  to promote exports of raw sugar from India. This was especially in view of the production glut at home, with closing stocks of sugar, at 105 lt in 2017-18, equivalent to five months of domestic consumption
• Much of the world sugar trade is in ‘raws’ that are transported in bulk vessels of 40,000-70,000 tonnes capacity
• ‘Whites’, on the other hand, are usually packed in 50-kg polypropylene bags and shipped in 12,500-27,000-tonne container cargoes over shorter distances
• Raw sugar requires no bagging or containerisation and can be loaded in bulk; the buyer here is the refiner, not the end-consumer

4. India's raw Advantage

• Apart from the time window and freight cost savings, the delegation highlighted two specific advantages of Indian raw sugar.
• First, it is free of dextran, a bacterial compound formed when sugarcane stays in the sun for too long after harvesting
• Our raw sugar has no dextran, as it is produced from fresh cane crushed within 12-24 hours of harvesting
• Second, Indian mills could supply raws with a very high polarisation of 98.5-99.5%. Polarisation is the percentage of sucrose present in a raw sugar mass
• The more the polarisation  it is only 96-98.5% in raws from Brazil, Thailand and Australia  the easier and cheaper it is to refine
• The efforts to push exports of raws got a further boost when Indonesia, in December 2019, agreed to tweak its ICUMSA norms to enable imports from India
• The Southeast Asian nation previously imported only raw sugar of 1,200 ICUMSA or more, largely from Thailand
• Those levels were brought down to 600-1,200 to allow its refiners to process higher purity raws from India
• Out of India’s total 110 lt sugar exports in 2021-22, raws alone accounted for 56.29 lt

Source: indianexpress