The Sweetest Sin

In order to placate the foreign sugar farmers that suffered as a result of the import bans, then-President Reagan sent aid in the form of wheat, rice, and other grains to the countries affected. This drove down prices for those grains and made it impossible for sugar farmers to switch to other crops to make money and drove may of them out of business. It also cost the U.S. Taxpayers 200 million dollars a year to fund the foreign aid program.

So what did we accomplish be driving up the price of sugar and destroying farmers in third world countries?

We made America fat and we killed the sugar industry. According to the Center for Disease Control the percentage of obese Americans has doubled since 1984 and current studies place a large portion of the blame on the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup.

1787network.com...

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if there were other reasons why the US government does things. Any reasonable person would see the cost of destroying foreign sugar farms has done to the US, except for of course the corn industry.