The sugar price surge
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2024
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We trace the commodity’s journey from sugar cane farm, to mill, to candy shop, all in a quest to find out why the cost of sugar has gone up. The US is the world's fifth largest sugar producer, with sugarcane grown in the south and sugar beets in the north. Even though the cost of sugar is rising worldwide, Americans pay twice as much as the global average for sugar because of a government policy. Brought about to protect domestic producers, a protectionist policy taxing imports of sugar is actually creating higher prices, a report by the government accountability office found in October.
We travel from a candy story in New York, to a sugarcane farm and mill in Louisiana, to find out what the impact will be.
Presented and produced by Erin Delmore Additional sound mixing by Cameron Ward and Helen Thomas
(Image: A worker climbs onto a front loader beside a pile of raw cane sugar inside a storehouse at a sugar mill in Louisiana. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Dear Daughter is the award-winning podcast from the BBC World Service, |
| 0:05.0 | full of thoughtful letters of advice, personal stories, and life lessons for daughters everywhere. |
| 0:11.0 | Search for Dear Daughter, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:16.5 | Hello, I'm Erin Delmore, and today on Business Daily, we're looking at sugar. |
| 0:22.6 | And you can bet we're tasting it, too. |
| 0:24.9 | So is this a mountain of sugar? |
| 0:28.1 | Yes. |
| 0:28.8 | We'll trace the commodities journey from sugar cane farm. |
| 0:32.1 | So this is a CH570 sugar cane billet harvester. |
| 0:36.5 | All it does is cut sugar cane. |
| 0:38.3 | It's a candy shop. |
| 0:39.2 | What are the ingredients in a candy cane? |
| 0:41.2 | Sugar and hard work. |
| 0:43.0 | All in a quest to find out why the cost of the sweet stuff keeps going up |
| 0:47.5 | and why Americans pay around twice the world price for sugar. |
| 0:52.1 | That's Business Daily on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:59.6 | You'll be pleasure. You've got to get the little broken pieces or else you'll break into somebody's |
| 1:03.8 | present on the way home. It's dangerous. Exactly. In Clementon, New Jersey, customers flocked to |
| 1:09.6 | Dave Geombre's candy shop for all kinds of sweet treats. |
| 1:13.2 | But around the holidays, they come for the candy canes. |
| 1:16.4 | Sounds good to me. 164.65. |
| 1:20.1 | Dave's candy canes are made almost entirely of sugar, and all are made by hand. |
... |
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