USDA Seeks to Curtail Specialty Sugar Imports
The U.S. will not import specialty sugars "beyond what U.S. international obligations dictate," so that American sugar producers can gain a greater foothold in the market, the USDA said in a July 14 release.
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"Although sugar policy is uniquely designed to protect sugar farmers from the dumping of heavily subsidized foreign sugar, those farmers are not immune from the same distress facing other agricultural producers," Deputy Agriculture Secretary Stephen Alexander Vaden said in the statement, blaming a trade landscape that "over the last four years, favored foreign competitors."
Vaden also said that sugar imports have more than doubled in the past 20 years, with American producers losing 15% of the U.S. sugar market share to imports. This has led to closures of mills and processors, he said.