Sugar arguments are baloney

The major users of U.S.-produced sugar are ratcheting up their perennial effort to kill the U.S. sugar program as the U.S. House takes up a Senate-passed farm bill that includes a new sugar program. It’s an old story featuring the same cast of corporate characters and the same phony claims big sugar users have trotted out for decades. It was baloney in the past and it is baloney this time around.

The big candy and/or cereal companies and food processors can’t show the sugar program costs taxpayers money via the farm program. It does not. So they routinely resort to the public relations ploy that the program costs U.S. consumers $3.5 billion in higher food prices. The suggestion in that admittedly big number is that if the sugar program would just go away, consumers would save $3.5 billion.

If you believe that, you should be wearing a tin foil hat and listening for alien transmissions.

What the companies really mean is they would be $3.5 billion more profitable. The notion they would happily cut prices by that amount is hardly credible. For example, sugar prices have dropped some 19 percent since 2010, but the price of candy and gum is up 7 percent. These are the same companies that have reduced the size of their packages (check candy bars or cereal boxes) while increasing prices. Sugar has nothing to with that long-entrenched consumer-unfriendly trend.

The Sugar Coalition (which in practice is the anti-sugar coalition) tried and failed to kill the sugar program in the 2008 farm bill. This time the group is putting the pressure on House members who benefited from the $41 million the group spent in 2010 to elect Republicans. In addition to multi-national companies that use sugar, the coalition membership includes the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has put House members on notice about what the chamber calls “a chronically flawed (sugar) policy.”

In light of the U.S. Chamber’s animosity toward American sugar producers, this would be a good time for the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce and the Chamber of Commerce of Fargo, Moorhead and West Fargo to issue strong statements in support of the region’s sugar growers and processors. After all, sugar is one of the most important, most successful and most efficient agribusinesses in the Red River Valley.

Tags: opinion, editorials, subsidies, farm, agribusiness