The environmental and social opportunities of reducing sugar intake

Sugar is the largest agricultural crop by mass and has seen a rapid increase in consumption around the world. There are widespread public health efforts to curb sugar intake through targeted policies given its association with noncommunicable diseases. Although curbing sugar intake aligns with sustainable diets that meet essential environmental and health targets, such a shift may be challenging from a political economy perspective. Utilizing sugar for other purposes such as the production of microbial protein, biofuels, and bioplastics, or using sugar lands to grow other food items, or rewilding could provide health and environmental win-wins that could be more politically palatable. Here, we explore several potential scenarios to illustrate the option space from which national and international stakeholders could choose locally appropriate pathways for alternative utilization of sugar or its lands. While beneficial, such alternative pathways would require the integration of environmental, economic, and health policies to provide a smoother diet transition that reduces stakeholder tensions. Given the trade in sugar as a commodity crop, international approaches that compensate sugar producers for avoided production or incentivize them for redirecting sugars to other uses will be needed. Such approaches could borrow concepts from Just Transition Partnerships that have been applied to energy system transitions in ensuring a transition for major exporters of sugar cash crops across low- and middle-income nations.