Sugar Prices

Sisu200

http://www.rte.ie/business/2009/0811/sugar.html

Thought this might be of interest to farmers who used to grow beet in Ireland for sugar production, until the shareholder became more important than the commodity and the farmers.

What sort of clowns have we in charge of the country?, everyone knew that this was going to happen in the future, but they still went ahead and closed the Carlow Sugar Plant and Mallow Sugar Plant. Our then minister for Agriculture and now Tainaste should swing for this one:mad:

Bitten & Hisses

It's early days yet to be judging the viability of sugar production in Ireland based on what appears to be a spike in world prices. There was an article in last weeks Journal or Farming Independent stating that a viable price for Irish sugar would need to be above current levels. Therefore, Irish sugar production simply isn't competitive, unless of course this isn't a spike and is a prolonged trend.
That said, I agree that it was silly for Ireland to exit sugar production completely, subsidies or not. The benefit to the greater economy was immense. There's no going back now, unfortunately; not much of the Mallow site left...

Sisu200

Not much of the Carlow site left either, Tate and Lyle have built 4 brand new Sugar processing facilities in the uk in the past 2 years, according to Farmers Weekly, they process 50% Cane sugar and 50% Beet sugar, the Carlow plant made 19 million euro of a profit in the final campaign, I think it will be more prolonged as Brazil are busy making Ethanol, btw most sugar that comes to Ireland is been imported from South Africa and Namibia, what happens if this supply is cutoff, droughts, war etc. it is completely out of our countries hands.

Bitten & Hisses

I agree that it's crazy for Ireland to have exited completely. If Finland can have sugar processing why can't we? The global price certainly doesn't justify having an industry here, but it was profitable at all levels of the supply chain due to subsidies. It's one of those occasions where these subsidies were money well spent for our government, due to the huge amount of economic activity around the industry.

rmdt

Despite the huge rise in the commodity price of sugar at the moment it would still be uneconomical to produce sugar in Ireland. Think France is about the only western european country that is able to economically produce sugar at the moment...and only by a very small margin.