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How Sweet It Isn’t

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Sugar has moved to center stage in Congress in a confusion of maneuvers that threaten continued inflated prices for consumers and broad disruption of the already troubled world market.

The bad news began with the announcement of new reductions in the import quotas that already had been reduced by 75% over the last four years. This squeeze on the pathetically poor producers of the Third World was a result of the congressional mandate that domestic producers be protected. But when Congress realized that the Philippines and Caribbean nations would be the principal targets of the cutbacks, just when the United States was trying to help them stabilize their troubled societies, two congressional committees approved special added quotas for the Philippines and the Caribbean nations, restoring their quotas to the 1983-84 level for one year. But at a terrible price: The bonus sugar would then be re-exported at a reduced price to compete on the world market, exacerbating the huge surplus and thereby punishing other desperate Third World producers.

There is a better plan--just introduced in Congress by Sens. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.) and William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) and Reps. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) and Willis D. Gradison Jr. (R-Ohio)--that would strip away over a four-year period the costly protection that is currently given to American sugar producers. Under the provisions of the plan, the loan rate would be cut from its present level of 18 cents a pound to 12 cents, and import quotas would be increased until they reached the 1983-84 level. This would certainly end the anomaly of American sugar growers producing more and more even while U.S. consumption declines and a world surplus grows. This ever-growing economic absurdity, implemented at the expense of consumers, is the result of legislation that guarantees sugar producers a profit--the only farmers so benefited.

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As the sugar producers have manipulated successfully their congressional support, sugar has dwindled from 62% of the American sweetener market in 1981 to 43% this year. Corn sweeteners have grown from 32% to 44% of the market, and low-calorie substitutes from 5% to 12%. But all of the losses in sugar sales have been made at the expense of foreign producers--never mind that they can produce sugar more cheaply and that they depend on sugar in many cases as the sole way to climb out of poverty.

Congressional efforts to give temporary relief to the Philippines and the Caribbean nations at least recognize part of the injustice of the existing program. But the kind of partial remedy now proposed does more harm than good. Real redress depends on providing increased access to the U.S. market for all foreign producers and relieving the American consumer of this unnecessary burden of artificially high prices.

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