U.S. Sugar Market Stable, but Flat Consumption, Global Glut Loom

(The Fence Post) – The U.S. sugar market has stabilized since the latest agreements with Mexico went into effect, but flat consumption patterns and a global glut of sugar pose problems for the future, sugar analysts said here last week at the International Sweetener Symposium, a gathering of the nation’s cane and beet growers.

“After a traumatic first 10 years of unrestricted sweetener trade, it appears that the U.S./Mexico sweetener markets have finally found a reasonable balance,” said Mike Gorrell, president and CEO of the Imperial Sugar Company in Savannah, Ga.

Gorrell was the leading sugar refiner executive insisting that the agreements with Mexico be renegotiated because U.S. refiners were not getting enough raw sugar to refine.

Humberto Jasso, executive vice president of the Mexican Sugar Chamber, also said that the agreements are working fairly, but said it is important for the Mexico industry to get as much information as early as possible in the production season about how much sugar the Agriculture Department is likely to allow after Mexico’s basic allotment.

Jasso also said Mexican growers worry about the possibility that the North American Free Trade Agreement renegotiation might break down.

If the United States would withdraw, as President Donald Trump has threatened, and pre-NAFTA tariffs were applied, Mexico would stop importing high-fructose corn syrup because that would basically make the country self-sufficient in sweeteners, Jasso said.

Barbara Fecso, director of dairy and sweetener analysis at the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency, said that last year’s imports were “a little on the high side” and that this year USDA would undertake only “baby steps” when announcing any increases in imports.

Under the sugar program in the farm bill, Fecso and others at USDA are supposed to allow enough imports to supply the market without creating an excess that would lower prices so much that U.S. growers would deliver sugar to the government under a nonrecourse loan program.

Frank Jenkins, president of JGS Commodities, a Wilton, Conn., consulting firm, noted that when candy companies and other users began to respond to consumer questions about genetic modification, the beet sugar industry “did a very good job of going on the offensive” by reducing prices and telling buyers that if they bought only higher priced cane sugar “it is going to cost you a lot of money if you stay away from our product.”

The agreements with Mexico that suspended the U.S. government’s punitive tariffs due to Mexican subsidization of sugar and dumping into the U.S. markets have now provided U.S. cane refiners with enough raw sugar so that they can compete with Midwestern beet sugar producers, Jenkins said.

For the cane refiner and beet processor the agreements are working “pretty well,” Jenkins said.

OUTLOOK

An International Sweetener Symposium discussion of the U.S. market outlook featured this display of products being marketed as containing reduced sugar. (Jerry Hagstrom/The Hagstrom Report)

But the analyst also noted that food deliveries are down and that products such as Coke Zero Sugar are doing very well in the marketplace.

Smucker’s, he noted, has 22 different jam and jelly products that are either reduced sugar or sugar-free.

“They don’t do that to be spiteful. That is what the consumer wants to see,” Jenkins said.

“I have spent my whole career in the sugar industry,” he added. “This is a horrible trend.”

Gorell also pointed out that sweetener consumption has been flat since 2002 and that the only way the sugar industry has grown has been by recapturing market share from high-fructose corn syrup.

Gorell noted that the amount of sugar-containing product imports is rising. He said that “the last thing” he would say to the growers is that prices are too high, but that the growers need to be aware that imports of sugar containing products are growing and that the situation is a threat to the industry.

Other analysts noted that there is a global glut of sugar and that if world prices go low enough it will be practical to import that sugar even if the importers have to pay high tariffs on it.

Ben Fessler, a market analyst with C. Czarnikow Sugar, said more than 20 million tons of sugar now overhang the international market.

While Brazil used to be the producer that most affected the international markets, the current surplus has been largely driven by production expansions in India and Thailand, which both subsidize their sugar industries.

Europe also added to the global glut with production levels at 20-year highs, Fessler noted.

FAS

Clay Hamilton, associate administrator of the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service.

Clay Hamilton, the associate administrator of the Agriculture Department’s Foreign Agricultural Service whose job includes gathering agriculture production statistics from around the world, noted that sugar is “usually grown by low-income farmers and the governments think they have to take care of them.”

But the sugar industry “is one of the oldest in the United States and has an incredible history,” Hamilton said, adding that it is “something we want to maintain.”