The Hagstrom Report

Agriculture News As It Happens

Navigation

Cane, beet sugar headed to different prices over GMO issue

2015_0805_RuffoloCraig
Craig Ruffolo

SANTA ANA PUEBLO, N.M. — The United States appears headed toward higher prices for cane sugar compared to beet sugar because consumers are concerned that sugar beets have been genetically modified, a prominent commodity specialist said here today.

About 95 percent of beet sugar is genetically modified. There is no genetically modified cane sugar.

“Consumers are worried about what [genetic modification] means to their body," Craig Ruffolo, a vice president of Mckeany-Flavell, a California commodity firm, told the American Sugar Alliance International Sweetener Symposium today.

Sometimes consumers “do nothing,” and in other cases, they avoid the product, Ruffolo said.

But there is enough momentum behind the concern, he said, that “there may be a differential for cane over beet. We may have a two-tiered sugar market for the first time in history.”

Ruffolo said that the amount of the differential has not yet been established, but that he would estimate it at $2 to $3 per hundredweight.

He also said there has been a “rampant increase” in the use of organic sugar, but that most of it comes from South America because there is very little domestic production.