Beet Sugar Profligacy Five subsidized beet-sugar factories—the English Beet Sugar
Corporation, the Ely Beet Sugar Corporation, Home Grown Sugar, Ipswich Beet Sugar and King's Lynn Beet Sugar Factory—have just published their balance-sheets for the past year. Between them they have turned an aggregate net profit of /279,000 for the year 1930-31 into an aggregate net loss of £15,000, In every case the profit has been largely reduced, and in three cases it has vanished altogether. Sugar has, ever since the War, been the spoilt child of successive Governments and there has been no commodity to whose production the application of political incentives has been more relentless. Largely under their influence, though partly as a consequence of the introduction of the new Java cane and of other striking developments in cane production, the market had collapsed even before the world depression began in the autumn of 1929. In an official Report last year it was revealed that between 1924 and 1931 the total assistance given to the domestic beet industry, adding duty preference to direct subsidy, amounted to £29,700,000, £8,800,000 of this occurring in the past year—to promote the artificial production of a commodity with which the world is glutted. The report estimated that of the 129,700,000, no more than £2,100,000 had been passed on to the consumer. The State is under obligation to continue the subsidy till 1934, but in no circumstances must it survive a day longer.
Previous page
