Sugar Essay

902 Words2 Pages

Sugar is an extremely important resource in the United States. Americans are addicted to sugar. It is used in an overwhelming number of foods, from soft-drinks to candy bars to snack foods to alcohol. In fact, American citizens consume nearly 300 billion pounds of sugar every year, or roughly 130 pounds per person (Walton). Despite the resource being highly abundant all throughout the world, the price of sugar in the United States is among the highest on earth. The price of sugar is being kept high on behalf of American sugar producers, who used their influence in Washington to pass legislation which allows them to grow their crops without fear of competition from cheap foreign sources. These producers recently ran into trouble when a sugar surplus caused them to default on $834 million that they loaned from the federal government (Wexler). In response, the USDA agreed to purchase 400,000 tons of sugar to keep these businesses afloat. Why is this happening? Is it a new occurrence? What is being done to prevent a bailout from happening in the future?
Sugar has been grown in the United States since its founding in the late 1700s; likewise, the interests of growers have been protected for nearly as long. The first protections for sugar came in the form of a tariff on foreign produced sugar, passed in 1789 (Alvarez, and Polopolus). Over the next 200 years, close to 30 different laws were passed that helped shut out imported sugar, allowing America's sugar production industries to flourish (Alvarez, and Polopolus). In 1934, the Sugar Act was passed (Alvarez, and Polopolus). This law, in essence, placed a quota on the amount of sugar that would be produced, as well as one for imported sugar from outside the United States. The ...

... middle of paper ...

... enters the US market. The federal government artificially keeps the price of sugar high through use of loans and subsidies, in addition to the import quotas that keep cheap foreign sugar out. These policies only serve to provide profit to sugarcane and sugar beet producers in a handful of US States. However, as supplies grow and prices fall, it becomes clear that these price support measures cannot protect against an indisputable truth: that growing sugar in the United States is not profitable. An elimination of the program would save taxpayers billions of dollars each year, and lower the costs of thousands of different products, from candy bars to ethanol fuel. It is unlikely, though, that anything will change, with sugar producers providing millions of dollars to political candidates each year in order to have their interests protected in the nation's capital.

More about Sugar Essay

Open Document