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Brazil's sugar mix is shifting toward sugar because hydrous ethanol demand has weakened through the year, changing how much of a large cane crop actually becomes exportable sugar. The size of the Center-South crop is only half of the story, since every mill decides how to split its cane between sugar and ethanol, and that decision responds to relative demand rather than to tonnage alone. Strong rains between October and March built the foundation for a good 2026/27 cycle in the Center-South, while later rains in May, June and July complicated the harvest itself. For commercial buyers watching a tightening global balance, the mix is the mechanism that determines how much Brazilian supply offsets losses elsewhere.
Marcelo Bonifacio is a Market Intelligence analyst at StoneX in Campinas, Brazil, where he covers Latin American sugar and ethanol markets and monitors global sugar production and trade flows across Brazil, India and Asia. He tracks the relationship between energy prices and agricultural production, and he follows the Center-South production region whose sugar and ethanol split shapes the international sugar balance.
Brazil's Center-South cane crop enters the 2026/27 cycle in good condition, built on strong rains between October and March, yet the rains that continued into May, June and the end of July work against the pace of harvesting. Wet fields stop the machinery and force mills to pause, which pushes cane back rather than removing it, as Bonifacio describes when he explains that "if the machinery is not able to cut all the sugarcane, the mills needs to stop". The same rainfall that interrupts cutting simultaneously improves the cane itself, so the disruption is a timing problem more than a volume problem. Consequently, commercial buyers should read harvest delays in the Center-South as displaced supply rather than lost supply, with the tonnage arriving later in the season. The distinction matters because a delayed crush changes when Brazilian sugar reaches the export program rather than the total that eventually arrives.
Weak hydrous ethanol demand through the year is steering Brazil's Center-South mills toward a higher sugar mix, which increases the share of cane converted into exportable sugar. Cane arriving between July and September, combined with a crop that may extend into December, gives mills an extended window in which to apply that shifted mix. Set against the northern hemisphere picture, where European beet damage, dry weather in Thailand and an India monsoon that left accumulated rainfall near 11% below the normal average all point toward a 2026/27 global deficit of 1.7 million metric tons, Brazil is the region adding supply. That divergence is sharpened by export coverage, since mills that have not yet fixed their sales still have selling to do into the market. According to Bonifacio, "most of the mills in center south are still behind the track for their hedging and for their fixations on exports".
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--- Written by Gus Farrow, Senior Manager, StoneX Media
--- Expert: Marcelo Bonifacio, StoneX Brazil, Senior Market Intelligence Analyst
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