Britain’s sugar industry is conducting a last-ditch lobbying campaign to prevent Brussels from removing its lucrative virtual monopoly in the high-priced European market in favour of more competitive farmers from the developing world.
The United Kingdom Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, has described the situation in which European consumers support European farmers by paying three times world prices for sugar as ”scandalous”.
But privately Whitehall officials fear the UK’s efforts to get the developing world greater access to Europe may be derailed by an alliance between beet growers, the sugar processing industry and the small group of poor countries currently allowed a tiny slice of the European Union market.
On Monday Robert Sturdy, the Conservative Euro-MP for East Anglia, the stronghold of the sugar beet production, began a campaign to water down the reforms, backed by British Sugar, which has a monopoly on processing beet sugar in the UK.
Oxfam estimates that British Sugar made a profit of £77-million in 2002 from its position as the only processor in a market where prices are fixed.
Sturdy has won support for his campaign from the small group of African and Caribbean countries, led by Mauritius, which currently supply a small fraction of the European market.
Clare Wenner of British Sugar said the company was on the side of poor countries worried about the effect of the reform on their access to the high-priced sugar market.
But aid agencies are afraid that the sugar lobby will succeed in preventing other poor countries getting access to Europe’s market.
”The British sugar lobby is pretending to be the friend of the developing world in a desperate attempt to preserve their own highly lucrative interests,” said Matt Griffith, a trade policy adviser at the Roman Catholic aid agency Cafod.
Europe currently dumps its sugar mountain on world markets at below production costs, bankrupting more efficient farmers in the developing world. — Â