More Government Waste for Agriculture

From Citizens Against Government Waste...

The letter from the chairman of the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida was a painful reminder that the U.S. sugar program benefits only a handful of people ("Boost for sugar is good for city," May 23).

The current price of U.S. sugar is roughly 20 cents per pound. The price of sugar on the world market is about 10 cents per pound.

Any economist will tell you that the price of our domestic sugar is artificially inflated by strict regulation of imports, a commodity loan program that forces the government to buy up any sugar that domestic producers can't sell and production controls that make it illegal for domestic sugar processors to sell more than their government-assigned allotments, even if they have buyers standing in line.

By keeping domestic sugar prices so high, the current sugar program encourages companies that use sugar in their products to move their factories to countries such as Canada and Mexico where they can buy less-expensive sugar and then just bring the finished products back here.

If you owned a factory that made candy, wouldn't you jump at the chance to cut the cost of your key ingredient in half, especially if you could do so by simply relocating a few miles across the border?

Regrettably, Congress just passed a new farm bill that makes a sweet program for sugar growers and processors even sweeter.

And by mandating a new and costly sugar-for-ethanol program, the bill will require the U.S. Department of Agriculture to purchase surplus sugar for about 20 cents per pound and then resell it to ethanol plants for less than 10 cents per pound.

The sugar program has always been touted as one with no net cost to taxpayers. But this costly new measure requires the government to give away taxpayer dollars.

This would be laughable if it were not so outrageous.

Thomas A. Schatz
Washington
The writer is president of Citizens Against Government Waste.