Sugar from da gummint

I saw a report on network news about the sugar lobby's attack on Splenda; too bad it didn't explain how the sugar industry sucks off the gummint teat big time. In A Sweet Deal for the Sugar Industry, Doug Bandow writes,

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.

...the Sugar 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 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.

(Link via Lynne Kiesling) Of course we can't listen to Bandow: he's a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

Seriously. One of the discussants on the MCLC discussion list dismissed Judith Bannister for her blaming Mao's Great Leap Forward for as many as 30 million deaths (in her book China's Changing Population). Even though as I recall she suggested the death toll was between 10 and 30 million, this commentator wrote,

The fact that Judith Bannister was a demographer for the US government during the Reagan years (remember the "evil empire"?) should strike a note of caution before we accept her figure of 30 million deaths.