When Americans reach for hot chocolate to keep warm, serve up a slice of pie at Thanksgiving, or make sugar cookies for Christmas, they rarely think about where the sugar comes from for those treats. But they should. Because more than 56% of our homegrown sugar comes from a humble, hardworking source: the American sugarbeet farmer. Right now, the farmers who grow that sugar are in peril driven by a broken global trade system.
America First starts at home, in the field, with our food supply.
The United States is one of the world’s largest sugar producers. Despite this strength, foreign subsidized sugar continues to flood our markets, distorting prices and undercutting the very farmers that provide us with safe, reliable, high-quality sugar
During the campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance said: “We’re done sacrificing supply chains to unlimited global trade, and we’re going to stamp more and more products with that beautiful label, ‘Made in the U.S.A.’” America’s sugarbeet farmers agree and we want to be a partner to expand products that are ‘Made in the U.S.A.’
But we can’t get there if Washington keeps ignoring the warning signs.
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Excessive sugar imports have deeply eroded American sugarbeet prices, which have dropped 42% over the past two years, to the point that farmers just harvested this year’s sugarbeet crop at a significant loss. Farmers are still preparing to plant next year’s crop; despite knowing it will be harvested at an even greater loss.
Decades of failed trade policies have left the American market flooded with a historic over-supply of foreign sugar. Those failed policies have forced sugarbeet growers to close 11 processing plants in the last 25 years, including one major closure this year. Once a facility closes it doesn’t reopen, harming the town it’s in and the surrounding communities. It leaves workers without jobs that need to relocate and a town and surrounding community that has lost a large part of its economic and tax base.
These conditions are unsustainable -- they threaten American farm families, cooperatives, workers, and rural communities across the county.
As the administration and Congress work to strengthen American manufacturing and agriculture, our family farms need urgent emergency relief to prevent more losses and factory closures and protect the economic engine that is rural America. Because this isn’t just about sugar, it’s about American farms, American jobs, American families, and American food security.
The ability to grow and produce our own food isn’t a luxury, it’s a national security imperative. From the food on our tables to the paychecks that support thousands of factory and farm jobs, homegrown sugar is the cornerstone of a resilient, independent America.
It’s time to ensure the vibrancy of these rural economies and to preserve the multi-generational legacies of sugarbeet farm families. It’s time to protect the real sugar we grow right here at home.
America produces the best sugar in the world. Let’s stand up for the farmers who make that possible.
Clint Hagen is a fifth-generation farmer in Michigan and vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association.