UN policy sours Third World sugar exporters

A UN drive to cut sugar consumption and obesity in the West while funding sugar production in the Third World is damaging to poor nations, a lobby group said on Thursday.
The United Nations aims to limit sugar consumption to less than 10 percent of daily energy needs, but diets of many Western teenagers contain more than double that rate. At the same time, the World Bank promotes sugar growing among poor nations.
"We are actually promoting increased production of a product...which we know, according to the World Health Organisation, that we should be reducing in our diet," said Neville Rigby of the International Obesity Task Force.
Rigby, speaking to Reuters at the opening of a World Health Organisation (WHO) conference in Oslo, said rising world sugar output was weighing on the price of sugar, making production uneconomic and forcing small growers to sell sugar below cost.
The World Bank, calling sugar "the most policy-distorted of all commodities", is giving soft loans to poor countries, while the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is keeping up tariffs that bar Third World growers from key markets, he said.
Rigby called it a "confusion of conflicting international policy", which he said contributed to making sugar one of the world's most fought-over issues.
"What is happening is we, as taxpayers in the West, are subsidising companies to make profits, while denying them the economic development which should flow to the poorer countries," Rigby said.
"This is costing the developing world money, it is costing jobs and economic development," he said.
The WHO wants to cut sugar intake to fight obesity in the Western world, especially in the United States where average sugar intake is among the world's highest at 31 teaspoons a day.
Rigby also slammed the United States, saying it wanted to designate sugar a 'sensitive product' to exempt it from the next Doha round of WTO talks on free trade.
"It illustrates how public health is caught up in a much broader political concern. It's an industry which is state subsidised in the United States," he said.
According to World Bank estimates, trade distortions in the sugar industry cause annual subsidies of $6.4 billion to Western producers, denying small growers a 40 percent increase in income.