1 12th Congress of the European Association of Agricultural Economists – EAAE 2008 (revised)

Abstract — The advertised EC policy toward sugar is clearly to let market drive supply and demand. But there exist reasons to think that the setting up of the traditional quota policy was not a consequence of chance, or of an efficient lobbying system by farmers, but of practical necessity and of efficiency, in face of market failures. In view of this reasoning, it is not impossible that a large crisis in the more or less remote future leads to reinstall a sugar quota system which probably should had to be reformed, but should never have been suppressed