Sugar prices are soaring in many places. That's largely due to production shortfalls in key exporters India and Thailand that are partly blamed on the El Nino. The U.N.
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    For scores of other bakers struggling to stay afloat while enduring higher costs for fuel and flour, the stratospheric sugar prices proved to be the last straw, and they closed for good.

    Sugar worldwide is trading at the highest prices since 2011, mainly due to lower global supplies after unusually dry weather damaged harvests in India and Thailand, the world’s second- and third-largest exporters.

    Wholesale prices had been allowed to rise to help farmers cope with higher costs — partly due to government demands that they not burn their fields, which makes harvesting cheaper but envelops much of Thailand in heavy smog.

    Looking ahead, Brazil’s harvest is forecast to be 20% bigger than last year’s, said Kelly Goughary, a senior research analyst at the agriculture data and analytics firm Gro Intelligence.

    For some countries, importing more expensive sugar eats up reserves of foreign currency like dollars and euros that also are needed to pay for oil and other crucial commodities, said El Mamoun Amrouk, an FAO economist.

    Back in Africa’s largest economy, the struggle of Nigerian bakers is a microcosm of the effects of rising food and fuel costs and the outsized impact of high sugar prices because it’s so ubiquitous.

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