Sugar-Good Beginning

Sugar Good Beginning THE price of sugar has come down from Rs 425 to about Rs 385 per bag/quintal. Normally during the first quarter of a sugar season, that is, during October-December, sugar prices remain high mainly because of the clever manoeuvres of the industry. No one knows how much area is under sugarcane. This makes it possible for the 'experts' of the industry to proclaim that the area under cane around factories in a season, is 'so many per cent' more than in the previous season, that rains have been ample and that the sugarcane crop is abundant. So, the argument would run, if the industry were permitted to compete with manufacturers of gur and khand- sari on equal terms, sugar production in the season would boom, the market would be flooded with sugar and consumers would have the time of their lives and the growers would benefit too. But to make all this possible the sugar mills must be able to pay an attractive price for cane which, in turn, would require that the price of sugar itself would have to be kept at a 'reasonable' level. It is through such clever propaganda that the sugar industry has managed, ever since sugar control in 1942, to keep Indian sugar prices at about the highest level in the world.