Those champagne corks heard on the Inner Harbor yesterday may well have been popping at Domino Sugar, where the high prices and corporate welfare are sweeter than anything that gets loaded on the trucks.
Congress' veto-proof passage of the 2008 farm bill ensures that Domino's proprietor, the Fanjul family, and fat-cat farmers across the nation will keep wallowing in trade protections that disappeared decades ago for other industries.
But while the bill is good for Domino, its 400 Baltimore jobs and a few agri-corporations, it hurts everybody else.
If you're having trouble figuring out why the legislation makes people so upset, a good place to start is to understand how it lets Domino and other producers charge twice the global market price for sugar and makes sugar welfare even worse.
This was the year that should have made a semi-honest industry out of Big Sugar.
Mexican sugar was finally supposed to be freely available to U.S. buyers under NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994. That might have loosened Big Sugar's grip and lowered high prices that are hurting candy and cereal manufacturers.
But consumers on both sides of the border just learned (again) that 14 years aren't enough to make the North American Free Trade Agreement do what it promised.
First, sugar concerns in both countries balked at full competition and proposed "managed trade," a nice way of saying continued protection.
(Ever wonder why U.S. soda makers switched from sucrose to yucky corn syrup? Thanks to trade barriers, real sugar got too expensive.)
Now the farm bill continues to guarantee 85 percent of the U.S. market to U.S. sugar growers, who are led by the politically connected Fanjuls.
"That is in direct violation of the World Trade Organization rules," says Sallie James, a trade policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute.
And in a ghastly mating that could have been conceived only by Midwestern congressmen, the Agriculture Department's sugar program will team up with the equally terrible ethanol program.
Senate Agriculture Chairman Tom Harkin of Iowa and House Agriculture Chairman Collin Peterson of Minnesota backed an addition to the farm bill that requires the government to buy sugar at inflated rates and sell it cheaply to people who will distill it into the ethanol equivalent of rum, which will be blended with gasoline.
At least sugar contains more energy than the fuel needed to turn it into ethanol. Corn, the usual U.S. ethanol feedstock, doesn't.
