Narrator: If boiled just right,
this clear, transparent juice
will turn into a thick, gooey syrup.
This process is the basis of making panela,
a type of unrefined raw sugar.
Panela is beloved in Colombia,
where it's commonly consumed
in place of processed white sugar.
But this sweet nectar doesn't come cheap.
In the US, it can cost 20 times more than white sugar.
And in Colombia, depending on where it's made,
panela can cost up to 17,000 pesos per kilogram.
The purest form of panela
is made by the Indigenous communities
of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta,
the highest coastal mountain range in the world.
Here, long distances, high temperatures,
and limited resources make panela much more valuable
than any other type of sugar.
So, how is wild panela made?
And is this what makes it so expensive?
Narrator: This is Antonio.
He's a Kogi, one of the four Indigenous communities
of the Sierra Nevada.
To make panela, Antonio uses a sugar mill made out of wood.
Narrator: Using this mill is hard work.
It takes three people to keep it running.
Two push the cane into the mill,
while another one directs the mule that powers it.
Narrator: In order to extract sugar from the cane juice,
Antonio and the others boil it along with water.
It took Antonio and the others two hours
to extract enough sugarcane juice to fill this pot.
He uses dried sugarcane to fuel the fire.
Narrator: The juice boils quickly
and at very high temperatures --
so hot that some of the sugar caramelizes.
During the boiling process, the juice is constantly stirred
and pushed to the bottom of the pot,
where the temperature is higher.
Antonio then removes the water,
revealing the sugar at the bottom of the pot.
At this stage, when the sugar has a thick, gooey texture,
it is called honey.
Narrator: Antonio scrapes it off
and pours it into these molds,
where it will rest for a few hours and become panela.
Milling sugarcane and boiling its juice like this
preserves the molasses naturally present in the sugarcane,
which is usually removed in refined white sugar,
or removed and added back in in brown sugar.
The molasses gives the panela a more complex caramel flavor
and makes it richer in minerals and vitamins.
But this can only happen if the weather is right.
Today, the weather is a bit too hot,
so the honey needs to be bottled
and transported to another village at a higher altitude
to harden correctly.
When the panela is dry,
it is sold in 1-kilogram portions like this one.
With 10 buckets of sugarcane, Antonio can get 12 panelas.
Narrator: But it's not just the process
that makes panela different from other types of sugar.
It's the sugarcane it comes from.
Narrator: Agustin has lived here for the last 12 years.
He's a local guide, connecting visitors
to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
with his native Kogi traditions.
Narrator: White sugarcane is native
to this area of the Sierra Nevada
and is what the Kogi community uses for its panela.
As he harvests, Agustin also selects the best seeds
to make new plants.
Narrator: It takes a whole year for sugarcane to grow,
and it heavily depends on the weather.
While farmed varieties can rely on a constant supply
of water, the sugarcane here in the Sierra Nevada
relies on rivers, rainfall, and meltwater from ice caps,
making them high in fiber but low in sugar.
Farmed varieties, on the other hand,
yield more sugar but are low in fiber.
The sugarcane here is also very fragile,
and proximity to other plants may kill it.
Narrator: When he's finished,
Agustin will walk to Antonio's mill,
where sugarcane will be turned into honey
and then panela all over again.
Narrator: Both the dried panela and the gooey honey
are an essential part of the Kogi diet.
They're used in drinks like aguapanela,
an infusion of panela in hot water,
but are also consumed on special occasions
like marriages and baptisms.
Panela has an advantage over honey.
It can be stored for longer, and it can be sold.
More recently, and only to those who ask,
the community has started selling it.
But the moment the panela leaves the sugar mill,
its price rises.
This is the main road in this part of the Sierra.
For panela producers to find buyers,
they have to walk to the closest village,
and that can take hours.
Narrator: The nearest village to Agustin and Antonio
is two hours away on foot.
Narrator: In town, this panela can cost
up to 17,000 pesos per kilogram.
That's more than four times the price of panela
made from farmed sugarcane.
But these high prices are exactly what the community wants.
In the last few years, the Indigenous communities
of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta
have worked hard to market their product fairly
and invest in better infrastructure.
The Arhuaco, another one of these four communities,
has partnered with the UN and Ecopetrol,
a major gas company, to modernize its sugar mills
and get a license to sell wild panela abroad.
The global rise in fame
of panela as a healthy alternative to sugar
is also contributing to increased demand.
Panela made from farmed sugarcanes
has reached over $36 per kilogram,
while indigenous varieties aren't yet exported.
But there is a difference
between what is currently available to consumers
and the indigenous panela.
Colombia is one of the world's top sugarcane producers,
producing 2.3 million metric tons of sugarcane annually.
Most sugarcane is farmed in giant monoculture plantations
and needs excessive amounts of water to survive.
According to the UN, sugarcane requires more water
than any other crop to reach maturity --
more than soy and maize.
In the last decade,
sugarcane has also been used to make ethanol,
which is considered an important biofuel.
This has ramped up sugarcane monocultures even more,
and sugarcane crops now take up to
60 million acres of land worldwide.
The overabundance of panela made from farmed sugarcane
diminishes the competitiveness of the wild panela in the market,
like the one Antonio and Agustin use here in the Sierra Nevada.
Narrator: But the isolation of the mountains
makes keeping panela alive here challenging.
In the last few years, snow has almost disappeared
from some peaks in the Sierra Nevada.
This means no meltwater in the summer,
a crucial resource for sugarcane.
The warming climate is also making it hard
for panela to dry fully, and more and more families
are either skipping the drying step and just making honey,
which is more perishable and harder to sell,
or they're moving their sugarcane mills to higher,
even more remote mountain slopes.