Marketing Margins for Sugar

Excerpts from the report: In 1958 the average American consumed about 97.4 pounds of refined sugar. This was 0.3 percent pound more than the 1957 average per person. In 1957, cane sugar refiners, beet sugar processors, and importers of direct-consumption sugar (sugar for use without further refining) delivered to users the equivalent of 49 million 100-pound bags of refined sugar in consumer-size packages (less than 50 pounds per package). Most sugar cane goes through two stages of processing to produce the refined sugar used in the household. The first stage--crushing of the cane and extracting and boiling of the cane juice--is done in raw sugar mills located in the sugar cane producing areas. These mills produce raw sugar and various byproducts such as molasses and bagasse, the crushed sugar cane stalk. Most of the sugar brought into this country from foreign sources is in the form of raw cane sugar. The raw sugar is put through the second stage--the refining process--in refineries located mainly in or near large port cities. Refined sugar from beets is produced in a single plant operation, and the principal byproducts are beet molasses and beet pulp. This report provides a brief description of the marketing of raw and refined cane sugar and beet sugar, of sugar marketing practices, of the price spread between farmers and household consumers, and of changes that have occurred, in the cost of performing various marketing operations in recent years