Posted on 02/17/2005 7:49:26 AM PST by Toddsterpatriot
You can never get enough from consumers and taxpayers. That apparently is the sugar industry's motto. Collect subsidies. Ban trade. Outlaw your competitors. Let the American people pay.
These aren't good times for the sugar lobby. Sales were down 4.3 percent in 2004.
Sugar Association President Andy Briscoe acknowledges, "Sugar has an image problem." Obviously, sugar doesn't cause obesity. Consuming too much sugar-laden food and drink causes obesity.
Which is why sugar substitutes are a godsend for many Americans. With most diets drenched in calories, Equal, Sweet 'N' Low, and Splenda all offer a modest respite. Which is bad in the sugar lobby's view.
So the Sugar Association has done the American thing - sued McNeil Nutritionals, Splenda's maker. The sugar lobby charged McNeil with false advertising and unfair competition for saying that Splenda is "made from sugar" and using the line "What are little girls made of? Splenda and spice and everything nice."
Actually, sucralose is sucrose, chemically modified. And it seems doubtful that this creative take-off of the old rhyme is why the sugar producers are losing sales. Few consumers could believe that they are getting sugar.
But the Sugar Association hasn't stopped with a lawsuit. The lobby also has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate McNeil. And the Association hired the public relations firm Qorvis Communications to create a Web site touting the "truth about Splenda."
Qorvis didn't put it quite that way, of course. Instead it announced that "a group of concerned consumers, led by sugar cane and sugar beet farmers across America," launched the Web site.
Ah, yes. Sugar cane and sugar beet farmers, who have spent years mulcting the taxpayers for fun and profit.
The current sugar program was established in 1981. When he traded his support for another bill in return for the Reagan administration's backing for the sugar payoff, Rep. John Breaux, D-La., famously opined that his vote was "rented," not bought.
The loan guarantee program has been costing around $200 million a year. Alas, outlays can go higher: in 2000, the Agriculture Department spent $465 million to pay farmers to destroy their crops.
When Congress reauthorized the program in the 2002 Farm Bill, it cut penalties on farmers who forfeited their sugar, boosting industry winnings by another half billion dollars. In addition, Washington spends an extra $90 million a year to pay for higher-priced sugar-laden products as part of its feeding programs.
Washington also maintains import quotas, which have been estimated to cost U.S. consumers about $2 billion annually. These restrictions have ravaged the economies of poor Latin American nations.
A fifth of farmers collect 60 percent of the benefits. And driving up prices - to as much as five times the world level - has pushed manufacturers to substitutes, such as high-fructose corn syrup, decimating the domestic refining industry (12 of 22 refineries closed over the last two decades).
But the industry always wants more. The Bush administration has been pushing to increase U.S. abroad with the Central American Free Trade Agreement. The Sugar Association naturally came out against the accord.
Of course, the industry-sponsored "truth" Web site does not mention what really is at stake: propping up industry profits. Although Qorvis claims that it is making no health claims, the Web site declares that "no one can say with certainty that the substance is safe to eat."
Splenda is used by thousands of products and millions of people, and no problems have appeared. Yet can we be certain?
If the safety standard for products was "certainty," we would have little to eat or drink. It is impossible to prove a negative.
But scores of studies have attested to Splenda's safety. The sweetener also has been approved by the Canadian Health Protection Branch and Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives of the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as the Food and Drug Administration.
With little evidence on its side, the sugar lobby simply pounds the table. "It's up to parents to decide whether their children should drink chlorine compounds," says Qorvis' Rich Masters.
A cute smear, that one. If Splenda isn't sugar, as the sugar producers claim, then it certainly isn't chlorine. Let's face it, there isn't much one might want to eat - hot dogs, say - after reading a label of full of bizarre-sounding ingredients. Yet the products are perfectly safe.
"Take ACTION" demands the sugar lobby. The American people should end the sweet deal that the sugar producers enjoy at consumer and taxpayer expense. Americans certainly should ensure that the sugar industry doesn't restrict their choices any further.
Should people use sugar or an artificial sweetener? There's no right answer. But it should be up to consumers, not the sugar lobby.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Doug Bandow says subsidies drive prices up, not down. I guess Willie was wrong.
Some kids consume so much chlorine that they even have chlorine compounds in their sweat. And don't get me started about the amount of dihydrogen monoxide kids are consuming these days.
"Scores of studies" may have attested to Splenda's safety but the testimonials will tell you otherwise. That is one scary product.
"Scores of studies" may have attested to Splenda's safety but the testimonials will tell you otherwise. That is one scary product.
It's a scandal. I've even heard that a small amount of dihydrogen monoxide in the lungs can be fatal.
In that case, Doug Bandow is an idiot.
Subsidies always encourage excess production, driving prices DOWN as abundant supply exceeds demand.
Since ALL sugar producing nation's do this, Bandow's so-called "world level" is actually the dump price of global excess sugar. It is below the "world level" cost of production. Eliminate the subsidies and you eliminate the excess. And the price of sugar increases -- GLOBALY, just like oil.
Then where is our lower price?
The subsidies and tariff in the United States should be eliminated. If other countries want to subsidise their sugar producers and in effect give our sugar buyers (American Consumers) a better deal, I'm all for it.
You,,,Bandow,,,,hmmm,,that's a tough one....
No, I lied, it's not tough, Bandow isn't the idiot.
Knowing how Willie feels about foreigners, and about rich businessmen sticking it to Americans, you would think he'd be in favor of this.
Yeah, let's put our sugar farmers out of business first.
Heck, let's do the same with all other staple crops, then we can be just as dependent on imported food just like we're dependent on imported oil. THEN, when some psychopathic idiot like Saddam Hussein causes commotion in some foreign sugar producting nation, we can go to WAR to protect our food supply!
</sarcasm>
No thanks.
And the high cost of sugr has outsourced how many jobs from candy manufacturing to other countries? How much business has sugar lost to high fructose corn syrup? The high price of sugar naturally leads the market to find alternative products and alternative places to manufacture goods that use sugar. Kill the subsidies and tariffs and sugar will have to modernize and become competitive. They are jusr sucking at the govermnet (i.e. taxpayer's) teat.
You really believe that about Splenda, huh?
A tool of the sugar lobby you seem.
Willie is a moron. Sugar isn't really even supposed to be grown in the US, but somehow we've set up a massive system in which an uncompetitive and bad agricultural base for a product is supported so that a FEW can profit from the many.
Not to mention that sugar subsidies are simply a form of wealth redistribution.
"Yeah, let's put our sugar farmers out of business first."
___________________
No, I guess it's better that our entire confection industry move to Canada and Mexico. How many manufacturing jobs do you think that means, Willie? It's funny that those honest folks at the American Sugar Alliance would claim that this is happening because of the cheaper labor rather than sugar prices. Sound familiar?
The confection industry is one of our largest customers and they will (every last one of them)tell you that the high price of sugar is chasing their business to other markets where they can buy sugar at world market rates.
http://www.industryweek.com/CurrentArticles/ASP/articles.asp?ArticleId=1282
I love how the sugar farmers try to blame cheap labour rather than their subsidies for the moves described - yes, it's so much cheaper to move to Canada, like Lifesavers did.
This tells us all we need to know about agricultural subsidies - they need to be killed immediately.
Regards, Ivan
Try to make the case, as so many in Washington have done so disingenuously for so long, that the point of agricultural subsidies is to “save the family farm.”The truth is that such subsidies – mostly on commodities such as corn, soybeans, rice and cotton, in which farmers are paid the difference between the selling price and a government-set minimum – are accelerating the rate of disappearance of smaller farms. The bigger the farming operation, the more subsidy money and therefore profit; the big farms use that profit to buy smaller farms, which makes them eligible for even more money, which they can use to buy even more smaller farms.
With the food police starting in, and lawyers now filing class action lawsuits against companies for causing obesity, the sugar industry is doomed anyway.
Better go now before it takes any more taxpayer dollar subsidies.
Oh, maybe not - maybe we should just tax the heck out of sugar and get more money from taxpayers who buy the product, so politicians can have more to spend ? Then we get taxpayers coming and going.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
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