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How Trade Agreements And Sugar Exports Affect The U.s. Sugar Market And Program

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1.1 Problem Statement
The goal of this paper is to describe and analyze how trade agreements and sugar imports affect the U.S. sugar market and program.
1.2 Background With the U.S. generating domestic sugar from both the sugarcane and sugar beet industries, the U.S. is among the world 's largest sugar producers and generated over $4 billion in cash receipts in 2015-2016 (U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS), 2017A). Sugar beets account for 55 percent of production, sugarcane produces 45 percent of the total domestic sugar production (USDA ERS, 2017A). A rotational crop, sugar beets can withstand a variety of climates. Poised to continue as the largest domestic sugar source, beet sugar harvesting and …show more content…

Section 3 describes the method and data used to determine impact of trade agreement on the U.S. sugar program. Lastly, section 4 will discuss the conclusions and offers recommendations for future study.
2. Conceptual Framework As aforementioned, the U.S. sugar production is large, and in spite this, sugar imported under trade agreements affect the domestic market. Consequently, to understand the U.S. sugar market, a dive into U.S. production supply and trade agreement obligations is required to understand how these elements support the U.S. sugar program. Corresponding to domestic demand, the U.S. sugar market constraints the amount of domestic cane sugar and beet sugar produced to not exceed 85% of the estimated U.S. demand (McMinimy, 2016). In addition to four smaller trade agreements with nine countries, a larger part of the unfilled U.S. consumption demand comes from importation under WTO and NAFTA allocations (McMinimy, 2016; USDA FAS, 2017). Based on patterns from the unrestricted free trade period of 1975-1981, the U.S. Trade Representative allocates a WTO tariff rate quota (TRQ) allocation with 40 countries and the USDA executes the sugar program each FY, beginning October 1 each year (USDA ERS, 2017B). The TRQ system applies to imports of raw cane sugar, refined sugar, sugar syrups, specialty sugars and

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