I stood on a red dirt path next to a tidy row of sugarcane, thick stalks sprouting up from the ground in bunches. The stalks towered over me. Thin, green blades for leaves shot out the top, some casually flopping back toward the ground. The leaves on the bottom half of the stalks were brown and withered, no longer needed for photosynthesis underneath the green layers above. This row of sugarcane joined many others to form a blanket across the gently rolling landscape, a vast ocean of cane extending to the horizon.
Sugarcane is a grass that, as its name implies, produces a lot of sugar. This sugar is concentrated in the juice of the stalks, which can grow up to a few meters high. For thousands of years people have harvested this sugar by pressing the stalks and boiling the juice.
I came to sugarcane as a research object indirectly, though in retrospect it seems quite obvious. My original research focused on renewable fuels and materials, like biofuel and bioplastics, that serve as an alternative to fossil fuels and petrochemical-based materials. After starting to study these bioproducts in the United States, where they are primarily made from corn, I followed them to Brazil, the second largest producer of biofuel after the US. Brazil has made industrial-scale biofuel for longer, having produced it since the 1970s. Brazilian biofuel—and more recently, bioplastic—is made from sugarcane, which covers the landscape as a monoculture crop in several parts of the country. Brazil is the largest producer of sugarcane in the world.
Most things currently made from oil and petrochemicals could, given advanced biotechnologies, be made from sugar instead. To study biofuel and other bioproducts and their role in post-petroleum futures, I spent time with sugarcane scientists and biotech engineers in the lab and at conferences dedicated to imagining and materializing plant-based futures in Brazil. They research how to develop bioproducts from crops like sugarcane, including not only fuels but also plastics, textiles, pharmaceuticals, cosmetic and personal care product ingredients, industrial chemicals like solvents and adhesives, and more.
What I eventually learned after spending time with these scientists is that they’re not actually making biofuels, bioplastics, and other bioproducts. What these scientists make is a raw material: something that can be used to make something else. Through their lab practices and knowledge production, they make sugarcane into a material that can be transformed into various bioproducts, as well as the conceptual basis for new imagined futures. The way scientists make sugarcane into both a physical and conceptual raw material is key to their role in bioeconomy imaginations.
Making Raw Materials
In a university lab in the state of São Paulo, I observed a PhD student, Antônio, carry out experiments with sugarcane straw to learn how to best utilize it to make bioproducts.1 He started with a small plastic bag of chopped straw pieces, which were the brown, dried leaves leftover on the fields after harvest. He received the straw from a nearby biomass research center that sourced it from local sugarcane mills. Antônio first sorted the straw pieces by size using a motorized sieve. Once he had a batch of same-sized pieces, less than a centimeter in length, he placed a handful inside a small metal canister the size of a soda bottle. After adding some liquid chemicals, he sealed the canister and increased the pressure and temperature for several hours. He periodically took samples, opening a small port at the top and sticking prongs down inside to grab a chunk.
The first couple of samples looked, straightforwardly enough, like wet straw. But after a few hours the tongs pulled out what more and more resembled wet, chewed up cardboard. It was darker in color, and I also started noticing the smell: sweet, slightly caramelized. The canister is a bioreactor, and with the chemicals, heat, and pressure, Antônio was breaking down the sugarcane straw into various kinds of sugar compounds—hence the sweet smell. He was redefining where sugar can be found in the plant: now, in the leaves (the straw), not only the juicy stalks.
Others in the lab would continue the bio-production process where Antônio left off. This looked like feeding the sugar compounds released from the straw to microorganisms, which, to use industrial language, act like little cellular factories, metabolizing the sugar compounds through biochemical reactions into other molecules of interest. In one of the simplest versions of this process, sugars are fed to baker’s yeast which metabolize (via fermentation) the sugars into ethanol and carbon dioxide. This is the same kind of yeast bioprocess that’s been used to make bread, beer, and wine for millennia. It is the same process currently used at sugarcane mills in Brazil to make biofuel, or ethanol.
Antônio’s work makes sugarcane—specifically, leftover sugarcane leaves—into a new kind of raw material. As scholars have long shown, raw materials are not found but made.2 Scientists like Antônio are surrounded by sugarcane every day, though not in forms recognizable as a plant or crop. Their cane is a fine brown powder in plastic tubes, a clear liquid in small glass vials, or something that looks like wet cardboard coming out of a metal canister.
If we imagine a conversion diagram of nature/environment to raw material to product, the first transformation is where my interlocutors intervene, in the name of developing new ways of doing the second. They explicitly referred to sugarcane as matéria-prima, Portuguese for “raw material” or the more technical term “feedstock,” defined as the raw material or input for an industrial process. “Making sugarcane into a raw material” or “making new raw materials” was how many of these scientists described their work in our conversations.
In labs and industry spaces, these scientists carry out experiments and generate knowledge that opens up new possibilities for converting sugarcane’s molecules into other things. This is not only in a chemical or physical sense, but also social and conceptual: they work to make sugarcane imaginable, desirable, and even commonsense as a basis for renewable futures. In doing so, they explode sugarcane into a kaleidoscope of many different canes. These canes emerge with distinct social lives, histories, meanings, futures, and, sometimes but not always, genetics. That is, my interlocutors weren’t simply breeding new varieties of the crop. Some of the canes they produced were surprising and not obvious: sugarcane that redefines where sugar is in the plant; sugarcane that is no longer even about sugar; sugarcane that is simultaneously waste and not waste; and sugarcane that is just an excuse for other research. These are all distinct cane raw materialities.
Raw Materials and Social, Political, and Economic Change
Making bioproducts from sugarcane is only one chapter in the monoculture’s long biography. Sugarcane was first brought to Brazil in the early 1500s by Portuguese colonizers. One of its early utilizations was imperial occupation: the Portuguese Empire’s sugarcane plantations physically occupied the territory and so staked claim to it.3 Later, further social, technical, and political work was needed to transform sugarcane from a raw material of occupation to a raw material of its most famous commodity, refined sugar. This shift was one of making sugarcane extractable, as the capacity for the plant to be the basis for the large-scale production of refined sugar was never a given. This work included the development of the Atlantic slave trade and widespread environmental destruction and land dispossession from Indigenous peoples. The overall result was world-changing: sugarcane became a raw material for refined sugar and in turn colonial-capitalist modernity, not only in Brazil but also the Caribbean and beyond.4
Over the course of these formative centuries, sugarcane plantations in Brazil were also being “modernized” and industrialized in the formation of a major agribusiness operation.5 Then, in the 1970s, sugarcane started being made into a raw material for not only refined sugar, but additionally for biofuel. This happened following the military dictatorship’s implementation of a biofuels policy, which was part of a nationalist development program and also in response to decades-long lobbying by sugarcane industry elites who sought a solution to volatile sugar prices and chronic over- and under-production crises.6 It took a lot of work to make sugarcane into a new kind of raw material: for example, the national biofuels policy heavily subsidized and financed the retrofitting of existing sugarcane mills to add fermentation capacity for the production of ethanol from sugarcane juice. Sugarcane production quadrupled within a decade and Brazil became not only the world’s largest producer of refined sugar but also biofuels.7 What further contributed to the success of this new raw materiality was the development in the early 2000s of flex-fuel vehicles, which can take either gas or biofuel or any blend of the two.8 When consumers go to the fuel station they choose at the pump what to get, depending either on the day’s prices or environmental sensibilities. Currently, almost all light vehicles on the road in Brazil have these flex-fuel engines. About half of gasoline demand by light vehicles in Brazil is met by biofuel, boosted by the fact that all gasoline is blended with biofuel at a rate of 27 percent.9
Sugarcane’s raw materialities over the last five centuries were all made in the mold of broad social, economic, and political change. It’s now another time of big change. With climate change and efforts to build more sustainable worlds, there is significant scientific funding for sugarcane research in Brazil to make renewable bioproducts. Such aims rely on the behemoth that is the sugarcane agribusiness in Brazil, for instance when it comes to the imagined feasibility of plant-based production at industrial scales. If between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries Brazilian sugarcane was located at the nexus of the plantation and the mill, in the twenty-first century it is squarely at the nexus of the industrial-agricultural field, the factory, and the biotech laboratory. This puts monocultures like sugarcane in an interesting and perhaps unexpected position with regard to sustainability.
The Architecture of Sugarcane
Many miles from the cane fields, in the middle of another large city in the state of São Paulo, is a university biology lab run by Gustavo, a senior faculty member whose lab studies how to make biofuel, bioplastics, and more from sugarcane. Yet the first thing you see upon entering Gustavo’s lab is not bioproducts nor sugarcane. Sparkling clean benches are home to small molecular biology appliances, like tabletop centrifuges. Occupying a significant portion of one bench is a plastic cube with small doors and narrow plastic tubes snaking in and out: a high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) machine for assaying the presence of certain molecules on the scale of parts per million. Gustavo’s lab, like Antônio’s, is a good example of what millions of dollars’ worth of sugarcane research has looked like in Brazil over the past two decades. It’s a rather distinct departure from the country’s century-old, robust sugarcane breeding programs, though these continue as well.
When I worked in Gustavo’s lab for a few months, I prepared samples for that HPLC machine. The samples were comprised of stems and leaves that had first been ground up into powder. I next washed the samples with various chemical solvents to strip off different molecular layers of the plant matter one by one. Then the samples went into the HPLC, which whirred and pumped for several hours before spitting out peaks on a graph on a nearby computer screen. The peaks signaled the presence of certain compounds and indicated how those compounds had once been arranged within an extracellular structure around plant cells called the cell wall. Such experiments aimed to elucidate what is called the “cell wall architecture.” Gustavo and the researchers in his lab are not sugarcane breeders but sugarcane architects.
Understanding the sugarcane cell wall architecture helps scientists make sugarcane leaves and stems into new raw materials for bioproducts. Plant cell walls are challenging to break down—requiring intense heat, pressure, and chemicals, or other complex biochemical processes—yet this must happen for them to be transformed into fermentable sugars, i.e., utilizable raw material. Another scientist, Henrique, painted a picture for me over a casual lunch during our first meeting: from the plastic table at the buffet restaurant where we sat, he grabbed a salt shaker, my discarded paper straw wrapper, and his heavy chain of lab and office keys. In his hands he jumbled them all together, tangling them and threading the wrapper between his keys and around the salt shaker. Plant cell walls are made up of complex, intertwined chains of molecules, he said, holding up the jumble of glass, paper, and metal.
This was not the first and it wouldn’t be the last time that a scientist kinesthetically conveyed to me the nature of the cell wall.10 Many others simply held up their hands and interlaced them together tightly and haphazardly. One scientist absentmindedly repeated this motion throughout our conversation, her cell-wall hands taking on a life of their own.
Henrique had continued that you have to first separate these components—cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin—in order to break them down and then utilize them to make bioproducts. This isn’t an easy task, precisely because the purpose of the cell wall is to materialize strength and protect plants from pests, diseases, and environmental elements. The difficulty of this tangled jumble is called recalcitrance. The cell wall’s recalcitrance is why it takes so much technical effort and research to transform sugarcane residues into a raw material, compared to the easier task of pressing sugary juice from the stalks.
There is a kind of conceptual recalcitrance too. It wasn’t too long ago that the cell wall began to be better understood by plant scientists, seen as a more active and dynamic part of plants rather than mere structure. An important insight was that the composition and arrangement of the cell wall is neither random nor static: it can be reconfigured by the cell, and qualities like porosity (important for the cell to be able to uptake necessary nutrients), rigidity/strength, and recalcitrance are carefully balanced. Against a certain conceptual recalcitrance that took the composition of the cell wall as the most important knowledge—i.e., the proportions of given molecular compounds, those represented by Henrique’s keys, straw wrapper, and salt shaker—a new way of thinking about the cell wall emerged in the field of plant biochemistry. This was the attunement to the cell wall architecture, defined as the conformation and arrangement of molecules in relation to each other.
Biofuel is currently made by fermenting sugary juice pressed from sugarcane stalks. Using leftover stems and leaves as raw materials for biofuel instead of the juice—i.e., breaking down the cell walls in those stems and leaves so that they can be converted to fermentable sugars—is a new approach. For Gustavo, being a sugarcane architect looks like breaking sugarcane cell walls down in order to understand them better, in order to break them down better—ultimately, in order to better make biofuel, bioplastics, and more.
Raw Material Imaginaries
Imagining renewable or bio-based futures based on and materialized by monocultures is neither obvious nor simple, given the social and environmental harms monocultures are known for perpetuating. Antônio, Gustavo, and Henrique are the first to acknowledge this. They all became scientists out of a desire to do something beneficial for both people and the environment, and in our conversations they foregrounded the challenges of living up to that ideal. They share concern about the social impacts of sugarcane cultivation—one of the reasons they were interested in inviting a social scientist into their spaces. They worry about the seeming inevitability that a company will utilize the outcomes of their research to generate profit rather than share benefit. Their research is constantly an exercise of maneuvering within a well-known system of constraints.11
One such constraint scientists understand is the attractiveness of technological fixes to policymakers as well as some of their colleagues. Ongoing energy transitions often take climate change as a (raw) material crisis, where raw materials, like oil, are the issue. As a result, new raw materials, like biomass or metals used for batteries or solar panels, become the way forward. But if climate change was taken as not a raw material crisis but a crisis of extractivist or racial-capitalist production systems, what other responses would become thinkable? Pursuing technological solutions to climate crises is a different approach than changing habits of resource exploitation. The latter, in my scientist interlocutors’ understanding, is a matter of political will. But their work also highlights how raw materials, and ideas about raw materials, are made through everyday practices in labs, research centers, and technical conferences. How certain things come to be raw materials for present crises or new futures is not self-evident, and involves a wider range of actors and sites than might be expected.
Social theories of materiality are often dedicated to extant, consumable, or otherwise self-evident objects, more so than the making of the raw materials for them.12 However, as scientists make sugarcane into a physical raw material, it also becomes a figurative raw material: for ideas about sustainability, resources, nature, production, science and technology, and more.13 The plant becomes not only something scientists think about but something that helps them think.14 As consumers of, if not bioproducts, then imaginaries or discourses about them, we also interface with ideas about their raw materials—with different raw materialities. When we think about what is sensible and desirable in terms of making the stuff that surrounds us, we participate in making ourselves.
All names in this essay are pseudonyms, following anthropological conventions.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2005); Tanya Richardson and Gisa Weszkalnys, “Introduction: Resource Materialities,” Anthropological Quarterly 87, no. 1(2014): 5–30.
Vera Lucia Amaral Ferlini, A Civilização do Açúcar (São Paulo: Alameda, 2017).
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985).
Wilson Cano, Raízes da Concentração Industrial em São Paulo (Rio de Janeiro: Difel, 1977); Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Jennifer Eaglin, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford University Press, 2022).
Brazil remained the largest producer of liquid biofuel for a couple of decades until the US started its own biofuel program using corn, overtaking Brazilian biofuel production by the mid 2000s. The US and Brazil today remain by far the largest producers of biofuel in the world.
Rafael Bennertz, “The Brazilian Ethanol Car: A Sociotechnical Analysis” (PhD thesis, University of Campinas, Brazil, 2014).
Nota Técnica: Demanda de Energia dos Veículos Leves: 2026–2035 (2026), ➝. One can also find flex-fuel vehicles, though they’re much less common, in the Midwest of the US near the corn fields.
Natasha Myers, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
Katie Ulrich, “The Substitute and the Excuse: Growing Sustainability, Growing Sugarcane in São Paulo, Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 38, no. 4 (2023): 439–66.
Timothy Ingold, “Materials Against Materiality” Archaeological Dialogues 14, no. 1 (2007): 1-16; Katie Lloyd Thomas, Building Materials: Material Theory and the Architectural Specification (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
Similarly, Erin O’Connor considers the social and cellular convergence of early industrial Victorian pathology, where the body became a raw material for conceptualizing the effects of industrialization, and industrialization became a raw material for conceptualizing the body and new diseases: “where social critics diagnosed England as a diseased and dying body, disease itself provided a gross anatomy of the social system.” Erin O’Connor, Raw Material: Producing Pathology in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
O’Connor, Raw Material.
