Sugar is an important strategic material related to the national economy and people's livelihood. More than half of sugar is extracted from sugarcane. As the largest sugarcane planting base and main sugar producing area in China, Guangxi has a planting area of 7833 square kilometers in 2022, ranking first in China. The production of sucrose is 6 million tons, accounting for over 60% of the national production. In recent years, Guangxi has significantly made breakthrough in the sugarcane seed industry by continuously promoting breeding and technological research. However, it still faces many challenges such as insufficient protection and utilization of germplasm resources and difficulty in promoting new varieties to the market. More efforts are still needed to break through the bottleneck in large industry of small seed.

Over the past years, Guangxi University, relying on the State Key Laboratory for the Protection and Utilization of Subtropical Agricultural Biological Resources, has continuously expanded its breeding scale, increased the number of combinations, as well as collection and utilization of wild seed resources, crossed with local varieties, and constantly introduced new varieties. It has also independently cultivated high-quality sugarcane varieties with high yield and resistance to smut disease, such as Medium Sugarcane No.1, 6, and 9. In response to the main disease affecting sugarcane production, smut disease, tropical species were hybridized and backcrossed with wild species, which have strong resistance. Then pedigree selection and zoning evaluation were carried out to strengthen smut resistance breeding. Medium Sugarcane No.1, 6, 9 and Medium Sugarcane Funong 48, a series of medium and large stem varieties with high resistance to smut disease, with high yield and strong rooting ability, were selected. This series of varieties show high resistance to sugarcane smut. The actual cane yield measured in the field is more than 12 kilograms per square meter, which is more than 18.5% higher than the current varieties. Production tests which lasted for many years have been completed in Laibin, Chongzuo, Nanning and Fangchenggang. It basically solved the bottleneck problem of high susceptibility to head smut commonly existing in the main varieties of Guangxi sugarcane region, and has the potential to be the next generation of main varieties. 

In February 2023, the major special project of Guangxi sugarcane science and technology led by the green sugar production team of Guangxi University was officially launched. The project is based on the key technology of multi-level membrane parallel co-production of sugarcane plant, water and sucrose, independently developed by Guangxi University. It also optimized the membrane combination and its integrated process; deeply studied the impact of specific ingredients of sugarcane raw materials on the membrane integrated process and the quality of sugarcane plant aquatic products; revealed the impact mechanism of sugarcane characteristics on the quality of sugarcane plant water; established the directional regulation method of characteristic ingredients and functions of sugarcane plant water; created a "water--sugar" jointly production model for sugarcane sugar industry; achieved the commercialization and utilization of sugarcane plant water; improved economic benefits significantly; developed the decolorization technology for producing white granulated sugar from water extracting concentrated juice; used the fermentation and synthetic biology technology to produce low-alcohol or alcohol-free sugarcane wine and other fermented drinks, protopanaxadiol, triol and other high-value products; provided technical support for the expansion of sugarcane sugar industry to high-end drinks, medicine, general health and other industries; comprehensively promoted the transformation and upgrading of Guangxi sugarcane sugar industry to green clustering; ensured the healthy and stable development of China's sugarcane sugar industry as well as the supply of national sugar; helped rural revitalization, the development of local economic entity and social stability.

Based on the annual output of 50 million tons of sugarcane in Guangxi, the application of key technologies such as green advanced processing in the entire sugarcane industry chain has increased the industrial output value from 50 billion yuan to over 100 billion yuan, feeding back sugarcane farmers to increase their income by over 10 billion yuan, greatly promoting rural revitalization. At present, this technology has been extended to fields such as camellia oil refining, craft beer production, and subtropical fruit processing.