Sugar for my honey?

The media today is full of moaning about a story that is a testament to stupidity – the division of compensation for the closure of the Irish sugar industry. There should be no compensation, because there should be no closure.

The farmers, who are only getting 10% of the fund, are arguing that Greencore, the compnay that run the sugar processing plants, doesn’t need as much as it is getting because the cost of cleaning up the plants is more than offset by the value of the sites – Mallow is worth €30m, Carlow €130m.

They would have a case if the plants were closing and the farmers had to give up growing sugar beet; but neither of these is the case. There is no reason to close the plants or to stop growing sugar beet. Now it is true that the plants have closed because, quite rightly, EU subsides to the sugar industry were cut as part of the World Trade negotiations. That was absolutely right, and indeed the eventual ending of all EU agricultural subsidies is only a matter of time – it is patently unfair that EU farmers get subsides while producers in developing countries cannot compete with them.

There is, however, a clear and vital alternative product for the now-defunct Irish sugar industry – bio-fuel, probably ethanol for use in cars. We import all of our oil, and it now costs between €1.14 and €1.19 per litre at the pumps (although most of that is government taxes). Sugar beet is an ideal crop for conversion to ethanol; the two sugar plants could easily be converted to process the beet into ethanol, and most modern cars can easily be re-tuned to run on a petrol-ethanol mix, or even converted to run on pure ethanol.

And yet the sugar industry is dead and gone.

How is this? Was there no warning that the cuts were coming? Is seeing the alternative renenewable energy product for the industry so hard to see that no one – none of the farmers, no one at Greencore and no one in Government – managed to work out how to save the industry, reduce our carbon emissions and save on energy imports? I guess that must have been too complicated for all those clever farmers, accountants and politicians to figure out. Go figure.