Sugar Growers Urged to Destroy Some of Crop

Sugar growers will be encouraged to destroy some of their crop for a second consecutive year in an effort to prop up prices and reduce a government-held stockpile.

Growers who agree to plow under crops will each be given as much as $20,000 worth of sugar that the government has acquired under a price-support program, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

The USDA is paying $1.35 million a month to store 741,148 tons of raw and refined sugar that has been forfeited by producers to pay off price-support loans. The USDA announced this year that it would sell some of the sugar for use in making ethanol, a gasoline additive.

The sugar industry was split over the crop-destruction program, which will be limited to 200,000 tons. Farmers who raise sugar beets wanted the program, whereas cane producers did not.

“We believe it is going to help refined sugar prices, which is so desperately needed,” said Luther Markwart, executive vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Assn.

Sugar beet growers are in the process of buying a series of processing plants in Michigan and other states, and the government program will help make the sales financially viable, he said.

The $20,000 limit on the program targets the benefits to smaller farmers. Cane growers are relatively large. A dozen members of Congress had written Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman in opposition to the program.

Sugar growers were united in praising an appeals court decision that a sugar mixture being shipped into the United States from Canada is in violation of an import quota.

The ruling Thursday by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upholds a decision by the U.S. Customs Service that the mixture was an “artifice or disguise” to get around the quota.

Although growers were pleased with the appeals court’s decision, they are concerned that another company will find another way around the import limits unless Congress steps in, said Joe Terrell, a spokesman for the American Sugar Alliance, a coalition of grower groups.