US Sugar Policy Is Propping Up Modern-Day Plantations--FEE

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For decades, domestic sugar producers have been protected from fair competition. In recent years, their influential lobby has ensured producers’ inflated profits through $260 million worth of federal subsidies and restrictions on fairly priced imported sugar. That’s why a bipartisan group of 64 senators and representatives as diverse as John McCain and Elizabeth Warren are co-sponsoring the Sugar Policy Modernization Act, which aims to introduce market reforms into the industry and bring our outdated, Depression-era sugar policy into the 21st century.

The US sugar program works to “enrich a handful of well-connected plantation owners.”
These modernizations are long overdue. These payments to special interests, on which the industry has long relied, will cost taxpayers $138 million over the next decade, according to a 2016 report by the Congressional Budget Office. Worse, these handouts rarely accrue to anyone but the industry’s largest and most well-connected players.

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