The 95 farm bill: Will sugar take its lumps?

Excerpt

My first assignment 27 years ago as a, young government program analyst For the U.S. General Accounting Office was to look into sugar beet marketing quotas set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It took less than two months of study to figure out that farmers in the north central and northwestern states could produce more beets and wanted to, but if they did they would have no place to sell them because supply controls limited what processors could put into the market; that the system was made more inefficient because sugar cane growers in the south were given bigger quotas than they could ever fill; and that the major beneficiaries were a handful of foreign countries that had Congressionally dictated rights to sell sugar to U.S. processors at prices well above the world market price. The program was foreign aid in disguise, and the participating countries had hired former Congressmen and Senators to continue to lobby on their behalf. The losers were farmers who could have met our needs through domestic production, and consumers who ended up paying billions of dollars in higher prices for everything with sugar in it. This was my welcome to how …