Expressing Sense of House Relating to Tariff-Rate Quotas for Raw Refined Sugar

Floor Speech

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Mr. DANNY K. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I have been very pleased to work in a very bipartisan way with Representatives Pitts, Goodlatte, Blumenauer, and others as we have shaped H. Res. 378.

The domestic sugar program is an outdated system of strict government controls that cost consumers $4 billion a year in higher prices. Historically, the sugar program not only hurts consumers but it also costs us jobs. High sugar prices were responsible for the loss of 112,000 jobs in sugar-using industries in the last decade. While growers of all commodities, including those for cotton, rice, peanuts, corn, soybeans, and wheat, have seen their benefits cut and their programs reformed, for some inexplicable reason sugar growers and processors continue to get a free ride and keep their program without any reform.

No other crop has a program like sugar, which restricts both domestic production and imports. Peanut and tobacco growers once had a quota that limited production, but Congress reformed those programs a long time ago.

Now we are only left with the sugar program, where it remains permanently in the 2013 farm bill to continue to cause higher consumer prices for food products containing sugar. This program is designed to benefit a few at a tremendous cost to many. Our current sugar policy offloads the program's cost onto consumers and food companies, entices U.S. companies to relocate overseas, destroys U.S. jobs, and limits export market opportunities for the rest of the economy.

It is time for Congress to finally reform this relic of a program of the past and put an end to sugar's special status. We can now correct a specific aspect of the 2013 farm bill by supporting H. Res. 378.

The 2008 farm bill directs the Secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture to manage the overall U.S. sugar supply, including imports, so that market prices on average can stay higher in the United States compared to the overall world price of sugar. We need to eliminate this same provision in the 2013 farm bill that would limit the Secretary of Agriculture's ability to allow sufficient sugar imports into the country so that consumers can pay their prices.

All that we are asking is to give the Secretary of Agriculture some flexibility to adjust.

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