"IN A rickety warehouse on the banks of London’s Thames sit mountains of caramel-coloured raw cane-sugar. For centuries the sweet stuff has come across the seas to Tate & Lyle Sugars’ dockside factory, to be refined into the white stuff. Cane accounts for four-fifths of global sugar production, but only one-fifth of Europe’s. Most of the continent’s sugar is made from beet, thanks to a technique developed in the Napoleonic wars, when an English blockade hit French cane-sugar imports.
No surprise, then, that the sugar-beet industry has been well guarded by Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. But in recent years the EU has reformed its system of quotas and subsidies to lower food prices and enhance its farmers’ competitiveness; production quotas for milk were dismantled in 2015, for example. Now it is sugar’s turn. From October this year, the EU will abolish its minimum price and production quota for beet. Its complex restrictions on sugar imports will remain, however, as will its income support for farmers."
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