What do Cory Aquino, cocaine addicts, and Americans consumers have in common? They are all victims of the U.S. sugar program.

• Author: Karaim, Reed

What Do Cory Aquino, Cocaine Addicts, and American Consumers Have in Common?

Quentin Burdick, a crusty, 79-year-old U.S. senator from North Dakota, was back in a homestate office late in August. A small group of farmers had stopped by, and after 27 years of representing one of the most rural states in America, Burdick knew just how to handle them. His gravelly voice rumbled with suitable outrage over Reagan's farm policy, and then, poised to extend sympathy, Burdick turned to a young farmer and asked how he was managing financially.

The farmer blushed. "Oh, he's doing fine,' a friend quipped. "He's got sugar beets.' They all laughed, and the young farmer looked down, embarrassed to have it so much better than his neighbors.

In this case, you can forget all you've read about the farm crisis. Sugar beet farmers aren't the ones showing up on courthouse steps for bankruptcy auctions. Beet farmers, along with those who grow sugar cane, the other crop that can produce white table sugar, form a tightly knit group of 12,000 that quietly enjoys the sweetest deal in the farm belt.

You probably have heard about the sugar program. It's one of those wrong-headed federal policies that comes in every now and then for a haphazard bashing under the general category of waste, fraud, and abuse. But such broadbrush criticism does not do this unique program justice. How often do you find a government policy that costs grocery shoppers $3 billion annually, jeopardizes Cory Aquino's future, affects the taste of our soda pop, stimulates the Third World's illegal narcotics industry, undermines the Caribbean Basin Initiative, and actually hurts sales of the product it's supposed to protect?

That's quite a coup, particularly for a tiny program that helps only 10,000 sugar beet farmers and 2,000 sugar cane growers, many of them well-to-do businessmen who fit the traditional image of America's struggling family farmers about as well as J.R. Ewing does that of the average oil wildcatter. It's not surprising many sugar growers turn beet red when someone starts looking at the sugar program closely.

To appreciate the envy other farmers might feel, you have to understand how the sugar business works. By using quotas to severely limit the amount of cheaper foreign sugar allowed into the United States, the government props up the domestic price to about 20 cents a pound, more than three times the world price. Then the domestic industry helps maintain the high prices by limiting the number of farmers who grow beets and the number of acres they grow.

Let's say a young farmer in North Dakota's Red River Valley reaches the obvious conclusion that sugar beets could be his ticket to prosperity. (While sugar cane is grown primarily in tropical areas, sugar beets thrive in the midwest.) This North Dakotan is a good farmer. He has a diploma in agronomy from the local land-grant university hanging on the wall. He's certain he could raise a healthy crop of beets.

But he can't. Not without a contract with one of the beet processing factories that are the crop's only market. These factories, many of them owned by the growers themselves, come back to the same farmers year after year for sugar beets. If our young farmer is persistent, he'll have to buy a contract from an existing grower. Last year, in the middle of agriculture's worst depression in 50 years, farmers were paying $700 an acre for the right to sell an acre's worth of beets. You could buy land for less than that.

There is a long list of farmers waiting for a chance to sign on with beet factories. A few sugar beet farms in California are owned by big corporate entities, but most of the country's beet farms are run by families in the midwest and plains states that have been fortunate, persistent, or wealthy enough to land a contract. The business operates a little differently with sugar cane. It is grown mostly by large cane processors and growers--five companies control 95 percent of the Hawaiian cane industry, for...