Sugar Kiss-Off

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I served as Warren Brookes Fellow in 1999) has a new paper exploring realistic options for ending one of America's stupidest agricultural subsidies: our sugar program.

They examine New Zealand's experience's in shock therapy with ag-subsidy killing, and America's with quota buyouts in peanuts and tobacco. The paper holds out the promise that past experience, plus growing international unhappiness with the sugar program in America as expressed in the WTO's Doha Round, might mean that the political power of Big Sugar could dissolve away soon.