9-5 IAN Sugar Slipping

  The29th Annual Sweetener Symposium held up in Coeur D’Alene had some not so sweet news for Idaho’s very sweet looking crop of sugar beets.

 We have been reporting all summer that the sugarbeet crop here in Idaho is looking awfully good… Which is welcome news knowing that the other headline that has dominated our discussions has been the drought. But farming is always challenging. It turns out that the price of sugar may be slipping and weakening the domestic sugar market would create global price instability - just like gutting Europe’s sugar policy had on developing countries worldwide. Paul Rybeg of the International Sugar Trade Coalition explains: “The worst thing for developing sugar  exporters is instability and a sugar price that  fluctuates wildly. If the US sugar program were significantly weakened, the US sugar price would probably correspond to the world market sugar price which is the most volatile commodity price in the world. The result is that a number of developing countries would probably have to cease producing sugar. We have seen this in the recent reform of the EU sugar regime where they cut their price by 36% and the result is that a number of developing countries that had exported sugar to the EU had to go out of business.”