Friday, December 05, 2003

Beet farmers find out what time it is If you ate something today with "sugar" listed in the ingredients, chances are it came from sugar beets.  I'm not talking about the beets that make your poop turn red if you eat too many of them, but the ones that make up the $2 billion sweetener industry the Red River Valley.  If you drive up there in the fall, you can find mountains of sugar beets being loaded into trucks and trains.  The beets store their energy in expectation of growing again next year, so they can be kept for weeks or months in cold weather.  They are harvested in the fall, but get processed through the winter and into the following spring. Typically, if you were lucky enough to own beet land, you could become quite rich just by investing in a beet cooperative and renting out your land.  That has not been so true in the last few years because sugar prices have been low.  But now, according to beet growers, they are doomed if the Central American Free Trade Agreement includes dropping tariffs on imported sugar.  Sugar beet farmers are protected from on high right now by tariffs and quotas and so our sugar is at 21-cents a pound compared to 6-cents a pound on the world market.  I am very interested to see how Senator Coleman deals with this issue.  Will he go to bat for the landowners?  Will he decide that free trade is good except for sugar?  Will he join the anti-globilization protesters?   Will he have enough weight to convince the Bush administration to keep sugar tariffs high?  Will he watch the trade agreement go through and hope no one is paying attention? It says here that the sugar industry is subsidized in those countries, so that might be a valid excuse not to drop the tarrifs and quotas on sugar. 10:27:24 PM    comment []