By Wylie Harris
Text of Radio Piece
Aired on Touchstone Radio, KEOS 89.1
First aired August 27, 2004
Listen online at: http://www.rtis.com/touchstone/tsradio/static/cd41-10.html
I like to think I'm an informed voter, so every once in a while I take advantage of the Center for Responsive Politics' website, opensecrets.org, to find out who's funding the politicians that supposedly represent me. A couple of consistent contributors to my representative in the U.S. House are the American Sugar Cane League and the Rio Grande Valley Sugar Growers. That's interesting, because my district is at the other end of the state from the Rio Grande Valley, and nobody within hundreds of miles of my representative's office grows any sugar cane.
The Environmental Working Group's Farm Subsidy Database, at www.ewg.org/farm, told me that the sum of federal subsidy dollars for sugar is relatively modest for a commodity program, ranking 12th at $44 million. There are fewer subsidy recipients for sugar than for any other subsidy than safflower, each receiving an average handout of over $8,000. It's subsidies like these, along with trade policies limiting the import of cheaper foreign sugar, that keep consumer sugar prices twice as high, or more, than those in other parts of the world – a difference that's presumably worth more than what sugar grower's groups are spending on my representative's vote, and others.
But if big sugar producers seem like a small and pampered set, consider the processed sweetener industry. Their purchased political clout dropped the proportion of imported refined sugar in U.S. diets dropped from one half in 1979 to 1/7 in 1999 as they cornered the domestic sweet-tooth market. Earlier this year, food-processing giants Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill paid a $425 million out-of-court settlement against claims that they'd engaged in price-fixing in that undertaking. But the winners weren't a bunch of consumers riled about the unfair cost of processed fructose. No, the plaintiffs were a group of 18 companies that manufacture soft drinks, baked goods, and confectionary and dairy products – tiny, struggling enterprises like the Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.
The shift to domestic sweeteners has entailed a changeover from sugar, which the U.S. doesn't grow much of, to corn, which it does. Pepsi and Coke buy up federally-subsidized high-fructose corn syrup on the cheap, evidently going to court when they think it isn't cheap enough. The fast food chains then turn around and sell it to the consumer – McDonalds sells more Coke than anyone else in the world – at a 1400 % markup, making soft drinks the highest-margin items on the menu. The chain spends almost as much on advertising as it does on the syrup itself. Overall, the fast-food industry and candy and soft-drink manufacturers spend a whopping $5.4 billion hawking their wares , more than any other sector than automotive manufacturing. Compare those budgets to the $333 million that the USDA spends on nutritional education , and it seems a lot less puzzling that per person, we take in 40 % more sweeteners, and 500 more calories, than we did in 1970. Nor, given those figures, is it any surprise that the percentage of us who are overweight and obese has doubled since then.
It seems like a long a twisty route from the Florida canefields through my representative's cattle-country headquarters to the national epidemic of expanding waistlines and health care bills – but in the money-talks world of industrial agriculture, that route is as well-traveled as it is shady.