How sugar is priced
Samantha Parrot, Executive Director - Snake River Sugarbeet Growers Association explains the complicated but very exact formula for how Idaho sugar beet producers get paid.
The price of sugar for our farmers is always pretty stable. That is because of sugar policy. So how that policy works is it authorizes the USDA to lend money to our sugar beet cooperatives through the Commodity Credit Corporation, the CCC. So the government loans money to Amalgamated Sugar, and then the grower delivers their sugar beets to the piling ground. And then the company is able to use that loan to pay the grower right away for their crop. Because keep in mind, it's just a beet at this point. But the farmer needs to be paid. And then the co-op turns that sugar beet into sugar. And then they market and sell it. And then once they get the money from the sell of the sugar, they pay off their loan with interest. So this program is designed to operate at zero cost to taxpayers because it is loans from the government. But we pay that back with interest. And then at the same time, USDA is always monitoring how much sugar is in the country because we always need to be importing sugar. Speaker1: And so they want to make sure that we have a really stable supply of sugar. They don't want to have huge imports of sugar coming in. That would flood the market and drop the price.
