Congressional Quarterly reports:
If you’ve been following sugar policy, this might make zero sense to you, because the American Sugar Alliance has been lobbying to keep out foreign sugar. Federal law sets strict quotas on the amount of sugar we can import from various countries. The result is a U.S. sugar price much higher than the world sugar price. As Sallie James at Cato puts it:
But the industry’s argument boils down to this: If we let in more foreign sugar, domestic sugar production might dry up, because prices will drop to points that U.S. growers cannot compete with. Then we will be dependent on foreign sugar. And if Brazil decides to cut us off — or if war cuts off shipping lanes with Brazil — then we’ll all be drinking our coffee unsweetened.
Of course, high sugar prices have, to date, driven us to use alternative sweeteners, like corn syrup. I don’t see why we would opt for sugar rationing in some future disruption rather than doing what most food producers have done in response to the government-created sugar shortages of the past few decades: find alternatives.
