By John Spain

IT was one of the first words of Irish we all learned. Suicre. It means sugar in Irish. And you could not forget it because every time you bought sugar here it was there in large purple letters on the front of the bag.

Soon those familiar bags will be just another fading memory. Irish Sugar, which made all the sugar sold here from sugar beet grown by Irish farmers, closed its last factory two weeks ago. The plant, in Mallow, Co. Cork, was the last of several sugar factories which once were dotted around the country in places like Tuam and Carlow, giving important employment in rural towns in decades when there was little other industry available.

In fact Irish Sugar was one of the first of the industries encouraged by the new state after we got our independence. It epitomized the can-do attitude and national fervor of the leaders who set out to build the new Ireland.

Up to then, all sugar was imported. But why should we import sugar? We’ll grow our own beet and build our own sugar factories, the new leaders said. And so they did.

For many decades the project was a great success. And that success continued in more recent years after the industry passed out of state ownership.

As time went on, however, the beet farmers and the industry itself became ever more reliant on the massive hidden subsidies they were getting from the European Union.

In the last five or 10 years, the sweet taste of Irish sugar (and sugar from other European countries) was leaving an increasingly bitter taste in mouths in the Third World. As we learned more about how international trade and markets work, there was a growing awareness of the damage bring done by the EU’s subsidy-driven Common Agriculture Policy. And sugar was a major culprit.

There was something deeply hypocritical about the developed countries of western Europe running substantial aid programs for the Third World and big events like Live Aid, and on the other hand having farm policies that were screwing some of the poorest people on earth. It did not go very well with the campaigns being run by Bono and Bob Geldof.

In the EU the cost of producing sugar recently was (480 a ton while in Mozambique, a big sugar producer in Africa, the cost was (105. This should mean that beet growers and factories here would go out of business and the African producers would export plenty of sugar to Europe.

But that was not happening because of the huge tariffs imposed by the EU to protect European farmers. Even worse, the excess sugar being produced in Europe was being dumped in Third World countries at rock bottom prices subsidized by European taxpayers and that was destroying the market for local growers.

Most of you will be familiar with the way the system has worked in the past. Farmers in the EU used to get guaranteed prices for their produce, and if the market price fell below that level the EU stepped in and bought the excess, before dumping much of it in Third World markets. You remember the beef mountains and wine lakes?

In recent years this system has moved more to direct payments to farmers, who are then free to grow less without losing income. But the overall operation of the system has not changed enough so far to make a real difference in the Third World.

Tariffs are still high, not only in the EU but in the USA as well. The poor farmers of the world are shut out of the rich markets and over-production and dumping are still going on, making it very difficult for these poor countries to get out of the poverty trap.

Going back to the example of Mozambique, Ireland is sending an aid payment of (39 million to that country this year as part of its contribution to the Third World. But Mozambique could make double that amount on sugar exports to neighboring countries if EU sugar was not being dumped there.

And it’s not just sugar. The same thing is happening with other farm commodities as well. All of which has made it increasingly uncomfortable for consumers in the EU who watch the TV news reports on deprivation in Africa and wonder why the cycle cannot be broken.

The answer is that it can, and as awareness of this has grown the EU decided that some action had to be taken. Various reforms are underway, but the one that hurt the most here recently was the sudden cut in the guaranteed price of sugar by over a third.

The Irish sugar industry — mainly because of its small scale — was already one of the least efficient in Europe. The number of factories had dwindled in recent years to two and then just one — the remaining plant in Mallow where over 300 people worked. The savage price cut recently meant that growers and the factory simply could not continue.

And so ten days ago the gates of the Mallow sugar factory closed for the last time, and from now on all our sugar in Ireland will be imported. After almost 80 years of sweetening our lives, the end had finally arrived for the Irish sugar industry.

The reaction here was a mixture of nostalgia, sadness and anger. Overall there was a feeling of inevitability about what was happening.

The EU had become the world’s biggest sugar exporter after Brazil, dumping five million tons a year outside Europe at giveaway prices. Every euro being earned by sugar exports was being matched by a three euro subsidy from the EU taxpayers to get rid of the excess sugar.

This had to change, and the only way to do it was to cut the EU price. Sadly the Irish industry was too inefficient to cope.

We stand a much better chance in other areas like milk products in which we are super-efficient. But our sugar industry was a bit like some of our other manufacturing that is being lost to low cost countries.

Whether the changes in the EU will really help the Third World sugar growers will also depend on how Brazil behaves. One of the reasons Irish farmers are angry is because a lot of the sugar from Brazil, the world’s biggest exporter, comes from big plantations, not small farms.

They are still increasing their exports. But we can only do the right thing and hope that the World Trade Organization will push Brazil into doing the same.

One interesting view on what could happen to our sugar industry came from an academic in Florida (of all places!) who wrote to the papers here. “Instead of closing the last sugar factory and switching the former sugar beet acreage to other crops (already in surplus), Ireland would be better served in the long term by leveraging the existing farming and sugar-processing infrastructure to generate a sustainable product,” Ann Wilkie, associate professor in environmental microbiology at the University of Florida, said.

“Sugar beet is eminently suitable for production of bioethanol, a renewable liquid fuel that can be blended with petrol and used in today’s automobiles as a clean-burning fuel,” she said.

“As an example, British Sugar has started building a £20 million plant in Norfolk that will see low-grade sugar from sugar beet converted into 70 million liters of bioethanol a year. Potentially, credits for carbon emission reductions could be used to partially offset operating costs, in addition to the revenues generated from sales of the bioethanol product.”

She went on to say that waste generated in the process can be anaerobically digested to produce biogas (mostly methane) and liquid fertilizer. The biogas can be used to provide energy for immediate use in the bioethanol plant and the liquid fertilizer can be applied to beet and other crops, instead of commercially produced fertilizers.

In that way, the production of bioethanol from sugar beet could form part of a closed carbon cycle and provide the basis for a native renewable energy industry, Wilkie said. All of which is interesting.

The only problem is that it needs to be done on a big scale and even then the economics are uncertain unless oil becomes much more expensive than it already is.

On a personal level, I’m sorry to see the end of Irish Sugar. Many moons ago my father managed our local grain mill deep in Co. Kildare, but he was also a hobby farmer and he used to grow a big field of beet every year as a cash crop to pay for the annual holiday for his large family.

The seeds then were sown in a continuous line and a month or two later the rows of plants were “thinned.” This meant selecting the strongest plant every foot or so and then ripping out and discarding the plants before and after. This made room for the chosen plant to prosper and the beet to grow big and fat under the ground.

This task was given to us kids, under the supervision of a farm laborer. You worked on your knees, with one knee on either side of the drill.

The drill was about 80 or 100 yards long and when you looked down along it on a hot day, it seemed to go on forever. And when you got to the end, you had to turn around and work your way back again.

It was biblical. But we had great fun. And fortunately my father decided to concentrate on dairying soon afterwards and cows filled the field where the beet used to grow.