U.S. Food Producers Warn Of Job Cuts Due To Sugar Shortage

[tj2001]

U.S. Food Producers Warn Of Job Cuts Due To Sugar Shortage
8/14/2009 10:33 AM ET

(RTTNews) - Major U.S. food producers warned the Obama Administration this week that an impending sugar shortage could lead to increased prices and job cuts unless restrictions on sugar imports are eased.

Food companies such as Kraft, Mars, General Mills and Hershey have warned that the nation see severe sugar shortages and prices for the product and other food items of which sugar is an essential ingredient could skyrocket. The firms are currently only allowed to import a certain amount of sugar (1.3 million metric tons) before they have to start paying import tariffs.

The companies recently wrote a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack that said that without better access to cheaper imported sugar, "consumers will pay higher prices, food manufacturing jobs will be at risk and trading patterns will be distorted."

http://www.rttnews.com/ArticleView.aspx?Id=1040653&Category=Top%20story

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Don't we have too much sugar in our food already?

[4dsc]

2. Just keep the sugar out of our foods.

Problem solved..

[SoCalDem]

3. Especially foods that are already naturally "sweet".

and we could make up with Cuba, and get their sugar production going again.:)

[knitter4democracy]

4. Or they could reformulate and cut the sugar.

This sounds like when school districts threaten to cut bussing in order to get the voters to approve a tax increase.

[AngryAmish]

5. First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.

[Sub Atomic]

6. I, for one, would love to see sugar imports increased.

As long as the industry removes high fructose corn syrup from our food supply.

[vadawg]

8. yup get rid of that corn syrup and replace it with sugar

got no idea, apart from political reasons why they started using corn syrup instead of sugar in the first place...

[Sub Atomic]

9. Government subsidies for corn production.

The more corn the farmers grow, the more money they make.

That's why there was a such a huge push for Ethanol a few years ago as well - the farmers have a market for their product and the government pays them on top of the market rates to grow corn.

Agriculture subsidies are by far the largest 'welfare' program this country has.

[abumbyanyothername]

15. Ag sudsidies

are not going so much to small farmers as they are to big ag industries like ADM, ConAgra, Tyson etc.

[abumbyanyothername]

12. Perhaps these are the political reasons

1) There were native peoples living on the plains. These people, for the most part, did not buy into the capitalist propaganda of Horatio Alger and were, therefore, difficult to control. Something had to be done about them.

2) The government decided that it was our Manifest Destiny to have whites populate the whole continent from sea to shining sea.

3) Land was stolen at gunpoint from the natives and given to whites, many of them Northern European immigrants.

4) The industrial revolution made these farmers wildly over-productive. World War I gave them an outlet for their produce and encouraged even more over-production. By the early 1920s these farmers were in a depression a full decade before the rest of the country.

5) Washington decided to create more and more protections for corn farmers and more and more incentives to grow corn.

6) Sugar tariffs are a part of this program.

7) With all this corn being grown, something has to be done with it. As a writer (Barbara Kingsolver?) explained, so long as the US farmer is producing 700 calories more per person per day more than we need to maintain our health and weight, we are going to be a nation of overweight people.

[vadawg]

14. id rather we burn the corn as fuel than to have it in everything we eat

as to the historical notes in your post, i cant see why that would stop us from getting rid of the corn syrup from our diets and if we must have sugars at least make them natural cane etc.. As to the 700 calories extra a day, why not let people eat the extra if they want but encourage more excercise, id prefer that than being told to limit my calories...

[rucky]

11. my thinking, as well. n/t

[SpiralHawk]

7. Could this be the end of the Donut Burger?

Favorite brainfood of Birfers, Snuffers & Freepers? Oh noes.

[Javaman]

10. First they came for the sugar and I did nothing...nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

13. However, the truth is found further down in the article:

However, U.S. sugar manufacturers have insisted that there is no shortage of domestic sugar stock and that domestic supplies were actually increasing. They have argued that importing more sugar would not be cost effective because there is little difference between the world price and the U.S. market price.

The American Sugar Industry Alliance backed up these claims and said that a major domestic sugar cane harvest would begin later this month, and that a sugar beet harvest would begin in October.