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"There is no great conspiracy..."

One word. Congress.

US domestic price of sugar is twice the world price. It is illegal to import sugar. Ditto peanuts and hosts of other products.

If law. The force of government. Arrest. Fines. Prison sentences aren't at least an open conspiracy, I don't know what is.

Ethanol fans should at least remove the quotas on imports and 'save' and 'help' the consumer. After all this is the reason they are such fans of ehtanol. Right? Right? Money, profits are secondary. Of course, once this tax/money shuffling farm scam really gets big, and farmers get even more hooked on the public tax teat....then they'll demand, demand I say, demand, Congress open up the US market to cheap foreign ethanol. Right. Suckers line up please. What ever the prospects of ethanol, you can rest assured the the US will be the high cost nation. Which means all energy users will have higher priced goods, more difficult to export.

I was talking about crops that can be grown on a massive scale in this country, which knocks sugar crops out of the running. But if we are going to talk about imports, who lobbies for protection of the American sugar industry? It's not American ethanol producers or corn farmers. It's American sugar crop growers. They're the ones who want to keep sugar prices high because they know good and well they wouldn't survive if the going price of their product was cut in half. Ethanol producers, including ADM, would be happy to use sugar or molasses if they could get it cheap enough. They can't though and I'm not so sure they could if they could buy it on the world market without all the tariffs either. Tariffs aside, importing feedstocks for ethanol production will probably always be more expensive than just having the ethanol produced right where the feedstocks are grown and then importing the final product.