Mexico got some good news this month: the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates it will need to import over a million tons of Mexican sugar in the coming marketing year, a 512 percent jump, the product of months of talks between the two governments. The announcement, reported July 13, promises a windfall for roughly 170,000 Mexican sugarcane producers. The warm language about dialogue and mutual benefit is true as far as it goes. But the real story sits behind the announcement, in the machinery that decides who gets to sell sugar into the American market and who captures the difference between what it costs to grow and what it costs at the checkout. The sugar program is a rentier machine, built by the very people who call themselves conservatives, and it has been pickpocketing every kitchen table in the country for decades.
I can follow the argument for some measure of domestic protection. National food security is not a foolish concern—no nation should put its entire supply of a staple in foreign hands. I’ll grant that honest point before I say the rest: what we have is not a shield for family farmers. It is a licensing scheme that governs exactly how much sugar can enter the country, from whom, and at what price, and the profits pile up in the hands of a very small number of very large refiners. The coalition that defends the program—sugarcane and sugar beet growers allied with processors like ASR Group, the maker of Domino Sugar, and Imperial Sugar—has been remarkably successful at convincing lawmakers that its interests are the interests of the American farmer. They aren’t. The family operation that once raised a few acres of beets in the Red River Valley has been replaced by a consolidated industrial complex that wrings its returns from the quota, not the field.
I used to trade sugar futures—contracts on raw and refined, the global No. 11 and the domestic No. 16. I know precisely how the program distorts every price downstream. By keeping cheaper foreign sugar out, it drives the domestic price well above the world market, and the gain doesn’t land in the pockets of the man on the tractor. It lands in the spread captured by the processor who buys at the support price and sells the refined product to a captive market. That spread is a rent—a payment for holding the right to sell, not for producing anything. It is the same disease I have spent years describing, dressed up in different clothes. Meanwhile, the small food manufacturer in Wisconsin who needs sugar for his bakery pays well above his competitor in Canada, and the family at the grocery checkout pays a hidden tax every time they pick up a jar of jam. The whole arrangement contradicts every principle the conservative movement claims to hold: free markets, limited government, reward for productive work. It is a government-managed cartel, and its principal beneficiaries are not farmers but corporate balance sheets.
The announcement about Mexican access is a reminder that even this rigged machine is not static. The same USDA report that projects a surge in needed imports comes just days after the administration slapped a 25 percent tariff on Brazilian imports in a separate trade dispute, a reminder that the levers are pulled by whoever is sitting in the executive branch. For 170,000 Mexican cane producers, this year’s restored access is a lifeline. Next year, a different political wind could take it away. That is the condition of a man who depends on a license rather than on his own productive capacity. It is the servile state Belloc warned about, written in trade policy.
There is a better way. It does not lie in simply opening the border and letting the world market flood the country—that would destroy whatever is left of the American family farm, and it would hand the whip to the global commodity traders who would be happy to replace one set of rentiers with themselves. The better way is distributed, and it looks like a cooperative. Sugar beet farmers in the Red River Valley already market much of their crop through grower-owned co-ops that bargain collectively with the processors. American Crystal Sugar, the nation’s largest beet sugar producer, is owned by roughly 2,700 growers operating across Minnesota and North Dakota, and the Valley grows nearly half of America’s sugar beet crop—proof that the co-op model is not theoretical. It is the working spine of a regional economy, and the returns it delivers stay with the people who turn the soil. That model should be strengthened and extended, not abandoned to a quota system that rewards scale and political connections. A co-op-owned sugar program would replace the licensing machinery with grower-allocated quotas that vest in the people who plant the crop, not in the processors who buy it. The federal loan rate that props up prices could be redirected through the cooperative as a member distribution rather than a processor subsidy. The co-op gives the farmer a share of the value added, a voice in the price, and a stake in the enterprise that outlasts the political cycle. It centralizes nothing—it disperses ownership and keeps decisions local.
On the Mexican side, the same logic applies. The cane growers who will benefit from this year’s restored access are not large landowners but small producers organized into thousands of ejidos and cooperatives—which is not to say the ejido system is uncomplicated. Disputed tenure, state intermediaries, and the collective-action headaches of smallholders are real, and any framework that pretends otherwise will fail the people it claims to help. A trade framework that dealt directly with those organizations—bypassing both the American processor cartel and the Mexican state intermediaries—would have to reckon with those pathologies honestly, leaving more money in the hands of the people who actually do the work. It would build a bridge between the small farmer in San Luis Potosí and the small baker in Friendship, Wisconsin, both of whom are dealing with the same extractive logic in different languages. That is the conservative vision: rooted, particular, human-scaled, and suspicious of concentrated power wherever it accumulates.
The reason we don’t have it is not that it wouldn’t work. It’s that the people who profit from the current arrangement have spent decades prying open every door in Washington. The sugar lobby is one of the more persistent and effective lobbying presences in American agricultural politics—persistent because the rents are durable, effective because the people who pay the bills do not have to. The result is a policy that has survived Republican and Democratic administrations alike, insulated from the logic of markets and the logic of justice. If you are waiting for the party of “free enterprise” to take on the sugar program, don’t hold your breath. The movement stopped being about free enterprise a long time ago. It’s about who writes the check. The rest is just the speech they give at dinner.
The earth was given for all. That is not a socialist slogan; it is the teaching of my own church, repeated by Leo XIII and Pius XI and John Paul II, and it means that a commodity as basic as sugar—a thing every human body needs—is not properly the private preserve of a few corporations operating under a government license. The answer to a rigged market is not a bigger rigging; it is a market where the people who work the land own a share of what they grow and a voice in the rules that govern it. That is what we were supposed to be conserving. Instead, we conserved the privileges of the connected and called it prudence. The sugar program is a small window onto the whole story of what went wrong. You can drive past a refinery in Louisiana or a beet plant in Minnesota, and you are looking at a monument not to industry but to rent. The co-op is the alternative that centralizes nothing and answers to the people who feed the mill. Somewhere, someone is still trying to build it.