Press Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                    CONTACT:   Phillip Hayes
Monday, August 3, 2009                                                            435-604-3113

PARK CITY, Utah—Calling the U.S. sugar industry a “multi-billion dollar economic engine,” Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) today updated participants of the 26th International Sweetener Symposium on numerous budget and trade issues, including loopholes in NAFTA and attempts to drain agricultural funding.

“We made bad [trade] agreements in the past,” he said via video conference about NAFTA, which has “loopholes so big you could drive a [sugar]beet truck through them.”

The loophole Sen. Conrad referenced allows Mexico to turn a handsome profit by sending the sugar it grows to America and then importing cheaper, subsidized sugar from other countries to meet its domestic needs.

“We need to plug these loopholes,” he said of the provision, which has led to sugar market uncertainty since taking hold Jan. 1, 2008.

Sen. Conrad, who is chairman of the Budget Committee, also spoke of numerous budget items that could affect farmers from coast to coast.

The farm safety net passed in the 2008 Farm Bill is unlikely to be trimmed during budget tightening measures, he explained, noting that the 2008 Farm Bill already included steep cuts for agriculture.

“Agriculture would be in good shape,” Sen. Conrad said of future negotiations.  “The big [budget] problem is not agriculture.”  Social Security, healthcare, and inadequate revenue collection were among the problem areas he mentioned.

And targeting sweetened soft drinks to help raise funds to pay for healthcare reform is now unlikely.  The soda tax is not on the table, he concluded.

Although the vast majority of soft drinks are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, not sugar, sugar producers oppose the proposed soda tax because, as the American Sugar Alliance noted in a May 20 release, “Such a tax would penalize our colleagues in the corn farming business and wrongly demonizes sweetened products.”

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