The government wants to find ways of helping us to lose weight. It could start by ceasing to shower farmers with subsidies to grow sugar. Remarkably, given the public money that is spent on telling us not to eat fattening foods, the EU gave European sugar producers 819 million euros worth of subsidy last year, either in the form of guaranteed prices, direct subsidies for exports or in other help. Defra, for example, funds a Hertfordshire research centre, Brooms Barn, helping Britain’s 7,000 sugar beet growers to squeeze ever more subsidised sugar out of the East Anglian soil.
For this exercise, British consumers have their wallets emptied four times over. We pay once in the form of higher food prices because the EU sets a minimum price for sugar beet; it can get away with doing this because cane sugar from developing countries, which costs half as much to produce as does European sugar beet, is subject to quotas and tariffs.
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