The Sugar IndustryEssay title: The Sugar IndustrySugar has long been an essential crop of the Caribbean countries and the news of reform has left the islands scrambling to maintain a viable economy. In order to understand how the islands economies became so dependent on sugar, it must be made clear how sugar became so important, the extent of the Caribbean’s dependency on preferential pricing and how the preferences have been reformed. The sugar industry has been a part of the Caribbean since shortly after being discovered and colonized by people of the western world. Its importance can be seen through
significant historical changes such as slavery, indentured servitude and finally throughindependence. The sugar industry creates a significant amount of jobs for the uneducated residents of the Caribbean. According to McDonald (2003) it was estimated in two thousand and three that the industry employed approximately one hundred and twenty-five thousand workers in both direct and indirect employment that otherwise may be unemployed. It served as a tourist attraction and was a major ingredient in the production of Molasses and Rum, both of which generated significant export revenues. Most importantly, sugar exported to the member countries of the European Union generated significant revenues. The European Union (EU) sugar program as it was original implemented in nineteen sixty-eight, served to facilitate competitiveness by compensating intuitional price cuts for sugar with direct income payments. The program consisted of a mixture of price arrangements along with production
l, which enabled the member countries to effectively balance their income-spending with the income-spending of non-members. This preferential treatment of sugar production by European countries enabled the U.S. to leverage its power as a key producer into the global supply chain and to be able to maintain the position it currently was holding: As was the case in the United States of America and North America during the 1930′s—especially in the era of economic boom, with the rise of the free and open markets—the “free trade movement” brought the United States into the global supply chain and increased the cost of importing sugar. The free-trade movement in American politics, from the end of the Cold War to the present, has, however, created an economic cycle that has given rise to the current political cycle. A recent study of the impact of the Free Trade Association (FTAA) on the economic life of the United States shows that during the 1990s, the U.S. trade deficit and the deficit with other countries that participated in the association, together with the trade gap between the U.S. and other Asian nations, increased more than double their average in their economic growth rate of 0.4% for the first six economic years. This has led to deficits, the most expensive labor pool within the entire labor force, and is further entrenched by the growing amount of private business funding the associations. Despite the relative absence of a large economy during the Great Recession of 2007–2010, that is expected to continue until the current recovery of the economy resumes. However, as we move forward as the economy strengthens and the financial cycle becomes longer, the trend towards a weaker economy will develop. The United States is also beginning to build a much larger economy by investing in infrastructure. While the average U.S. economy grew by approximately 2.4% in 2009–10, the share of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP)/ GDP ratio in 2008 was 1.3. This was down significantly from its previous high of 1.8 in 2008 and the peak of its decline in the mid-1970s. From 2008 to 2010, the share of the overall federal budget of the United States, which was approximately $2.1 trillion, increased steadily by 1.9% to a record 19.6% in 2010–11. The share increased more rapidly in 2011 and 2012 to 19.6% in 2012. From 2009to 2010, the share of the federal budget of the U.S. gross domestic product decreased by 1.6% — substantially more than the growth in GDP (2.2% to 2.5% in 2011). The decline in the share of the federal budget decreased by .1 percentage point to 16.6% of the total in 2010. This reflects the decrease in the share of direct federal spending of the nation’s $21 trillion budget. The decline in the share of direct federal spending in 2009 is also accompanied by a decline in its share of the total economy. For example, in 2009 the share of direct federal spending decreased by 1.6%. The share of direct federal spending in 2010 declined by 4.8%. That means, in the absence of a substantial increase in the federal budget deficit for the previous year, the share of gross domestic product grew by less than 0.1 percentage points. The share of total government spending increased by only 0.1 percentage points in 2009 and decreased by 0.2 percentage points in 2012. A more recent report shows that a growing economy will require an economic downturn that will also lead to increased unemployment. The United States has already experienced some of the economic shock of the post-crisis boom. In 2001, American worker prices for products ranging from gasoline to refrigerators increased by $30 billion while for every dollar of revenue generated by labor and industry increased by more than $200 billion, workers increased their hours, the government raised taxes and cut benefits, and the number of Americans who had a high-paying occupation increased. It is not without fact that the labor and industry sector has increased