Sugar policy not sweet ...

摘要

There is nothing sweet about sugar. America is being besieged on two borders by it, and there's so much in between that we're going to be plowing it under for the second year in a row. USDA has announced that it will pay sugarbeet growers up to 820,000 each to destroy this year's crops. They also paid sugarbeet growers up to 20,000 dollar apiece to destroy last year's crops. If they'd have known about this last Spring, you would have thought maybe they could have just told the farmers, "Don't plantthe sugarbeets to begin with, we'll just give you 20,000 dollar." Perhaps they thought that this year's sugarbeets were going to magically mutate into something we have a shortage of, like successful dotcoms or good left-handed pitching. But, depressingly enough, they turned into sugarbeets, and had to be plowed under. The Plowing of the Beets has become an annual Fall ritual because it's not worth it for farmers to redeem their crops out of the loan. Last year. facing forfeitures of up to a half million tons of collateral sugar to the CCC, then-Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman decided to give farmers the option of leaving their crops in the dirt and taking instead some of the collateral sugar that had already been given up to the government. That way, the farmer planted sugar, and the farmer ended up with sugar; the only difference is he didn't harvest any sugar. About 7 percent of last year's crop, 102,000 acres, went the way of the moldboard, so new Ag Secretary Veneman is going to do it again.