Historical Sugar Production and Trade Data and Working Dataset after R Manipulation that was used for data visualization.

The global food system, which centers on the large-scale industrial production and trade of global commodities such as sugar, has well-known ill-effects on environmental, social, and human health. Identifying how a system’s history has shaped modern patterns (path dependency) and resistance to change (lock-ins) is key to addressing its failings. The tendency to misplace the origins of the global food system in the Industrial Revolution or Green Revolution leads to calls for action that fail to truly address the system’s environmental and social exploitations. The Commodity Frontier concept, describing the extraction and exploitation of resources in service of commodity production along ever-changing frontiers, illustrates a longer time scale from the 15th century, the beginning of the Age of Capital (Capitalocene). Here, we provide quantitative visualizations of the sugar commodity frontier and its resulting lock-ins from the 15th century through the present. We illustrate the exponential growth and regional shifts of global production of sugar. An examination of export data suggests export-orientation lock-ins of several former sugar colonies that continue through today. Lastly, a look at the United Kingdom’s current sugar imports suggests a strong colonial trade path dependency. These results reveal that today’s global food system stems from the beginning of the global economic system based on long-distance trade of commodities in the 15th century, highlighting economic rather than technological roots. We argue that, in order to build a sustainable and equitable food system, food producers, consumers, and policymakers must acknowledge these roots and work to decommodify the food system.