Sugarcane is indigenous to tropical South and Southeast Asia.[8] Different species likely originated in different locations, with Saccharum barberi originating in India and S. edule and S. officinarum in New Guinea.[8] It is theorized that sugarcane was first domesticated as a crop in New Guinea around 6000 BC.[9] New Guinean farmers and other early cultivators of sugarcane chewed the plant for its sweet juice. Early farmers in Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, may have also boiled the cane juice down to a viscous mass to facilitate transportation, but the earliest known production of crystalline sugar began in northern India. The exact date of the first cane sugar production is unclear. The earliest evidence of sugar production comes from ancient Sanskrit and Pali texts.[10]
Around the eighth century AD, Arab traders introduced sugar from South Asia to the other parts of the Abbasid Caliphate in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa, and Andalusia. By the 10th century, sources state that there was no village in Mesopotamia that did not grow sugarcane.[7] It was among the early crops brought to the Americas by the Spanish, mainly Andalusians, from their fields in the Canary Islands, and the Portuguese from their fields in the Madeira Islands.