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Oxfam says that quotas and tariffs set Europe's sugar prices at almost three times the world market price, meaning huge subsidised surpluses are dumped annually overseas, depressing world prices and pushing other exporters out.
Phil Bloomer, speaking for Oxfam, said: "The sugar regime is a clear example of Europe's blatant hypocrisy in dealing with developing countries." Europe's subsidised over-production of sugar is having a "devastating impact" on the poor world, ensuring big profits for the EU's large farmers and sugar processors, but "undermining opportunities for people in the developing world to work their way out of poverty".
David Zimmer, Secretary General of CAOBISCO, the Brussels-based Association of the Chocolate, Biscuit, & Confectionary Industries of the European Union said: "In the U.S., the price for sugar is somewhere around twice the world price. We would find that almost a comparative luxury." He explains that the EU's baffling sugar system actually sets intra-EU prices at 3.5 times the world-price! Given these artificially high, politically fixed costs, "It is very difficult for us to compete with our processed, finished products on the world market."
"The prices for consumers and industry are always twice and often three times as high as world prices. Each EU nation, Zimmer says, essentially is expected to generate a certain amount of sugar, even if it can be produced more efficiently elsewhere. "Portugal never produced sugar beets" before joining the EU, Zimmer notes. "Now it produces sugar beets." There is no reason why Europe needs to grow sugar beet rather than import sugar cane from the Tropics.
People like Bob Geldof are calling for an end to unlawful government subsidies "We must end the furtive and immoral practices, which hinder growth in Africa - scrapping subsidies from the Common Agricultural Policy and US Farm Bill. We must abolish the tariffs that prevent Africa's products from entering our markets on equal terms."