Leaving the Sugar Trap: Establishing the Problem — A Positional Paper on Price, Storage, and the Governance of an Ungovernable Commodity

Global sugar trades on a structural fault line that the elementary apparatus of supply and demand cannot describe on its own. When harvests are abundant, the price can remain depressed for years; when a climatic or policy shock removes a meaningful share of available supply after inventories have thinned, the price may rise non-linearly and within a comparatively compressed interval. Yet the producers whose fields were most severely affected may possess little saleable volume with which to participate in that scarcity premium. The calendar is not fixed, the outcome is not universal, and the asymmetry is nonetheless structural. This paper assembles the intellectual apparatus required to describe a storable, weather-dependent, increasingly financialised commodity, building upon the rational-expectations theory of competitive storage (Working, Gustafson, Newbery-Stiglitz, and the canonical Deaton-Laroque model), Ezekiel's cobweb theorem, and the financialisation of commodity markets. The paper formalises the asymmetry between the producer who bears a shock and the market that prices it, situating sugar within an authorial spectrum of commodity entrapment and industrial optionality by comparison with cocoa, coffee, and more flexible production systems using reproducible monthly price data observed through June 2026. Finally, it outlines the families of structural exit that the historical and contemporary record makes visible, arguing that the trap is not a failure of forecasting technique but a category error in what is being forecast. One does not govern a non-linear, path-dependent system by predicting its next point; one governs sugar exposure as a system.