Sugar Industry Wants Administration To Look Into Dumping

Currently, American sugar producers, whether that’s beet or cane, provide roughly 70% of the need in the United States. From there, the U.S. imports the remaining sugar, with a majority of that coming from Mexico and several other countries.

However, the U.S. sugar industry says they are dealing with a problem thanks to Tier-2 sugar, or more sugar than the country needs, being dumped on the American market. Samantha Parrott, Executive Director of the Snake River Sugarbeet Growers Association says this extra sugar is being dumped here in the U.S. because the international prices is currently very low.

“Countries like Brazil, India, Thailand, they heavily subsidize their growers," Parrott said. "And so you have massive overproduction in those countries and they take care of their consumers internally. And then any sugar they don't need, they dump it on the world market and it's below their cost of production. This is predatory practices that they're using here and that cheap sugar is finding its way on the U.S market and it is displacing our domestic sugar.”

We Want The Administration To Investigate The Bad Actors

Parrott noted the entire sugar industry has a sense of urgency to address this over-quota issue before the end of the year. She said they are pursuing multiple ways to stop the dumping. The first, would be a temporary fix through the Administration.

“We have requested that the United States Trade Representative Ambassador James Greer initiate a sugar-specific Section 301 investigation," Parrott said. "So what that would do is it would allow the Trump administration to investigate these bad actors, basically the Brazils, and basically look into, are they dumping? Do we have a case there? And so they can conduct that investigation, determine if there's been harm. And once they have proven their case, then they can increase the Tier-2 tariff to block that sugar from coming into the country.”

Parrott noted she’s hopeful in the coming weeks the Administration will make an announcement regarding that 301 investigation; an investigation which she said will take 4-5 months. But, she pointed out the permanent fix can only happen if Congress acts.

According to a North Dakota State University study, Tier-2 imports depressed U.S. domestic raw sugar prices and resulted in an estimated loss of up to $1.8 billion for the domestic U.S. sugar industry last year.

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