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BOX 3-2
Sugar and Sustainable Development
Thirty million poor people in the Third World depend on sugar-cane for their survival. Many developing countries have a genuine comparative advantage in production end could earn valuable foreign exchange by expanding output. Some small states - Fiji. Mauritius. and several Caribbean islands – depend for their economic survival on cane sugar exports.
Industrial countries have actively promoted, and protected. beet sugar production, which competes with cane and has had quite damaging effects on developing countries: High-cost, protected beet production encourages artificial sweeteners; quotas have kept out Third World imports (except for some guaranteed imports as under the EEC's Sugar Protocol); and surpluses are dumped on world markets depressing prices.
In the 1986 World Development Report. the World Bank estimated that industrial countries' sugar policies cost developing countries about $7.4 billion in it revenues during 1983 reduced their real income by about $2.1 billion and increased price instability by about 25 per cent.
Over and above the increased developing, country poverty that results from these practices, the promotion of beet production in industrial countries has had adverse ecological side effects. Modern beet growing is highly capital-intensive, it depends heavily on chemical herbicides, and the crop has poorer regenerative properties than others. The same product could be grown in developing countries, as cane, more cheaply, using more labour and fewer chemical additives.
been more successful than developing ons in seeing to it that export product prices reflect the costs of environmental damage and of controlling that damage. Thus in the case of exports from industrial countries, these costs are paid by consumers in importing nations. including those in the Third World But in the case of exports from developing countries such costs continue to be borne entirely domestically, largely in the form of damage costs to human health, property, and ecosystems.
53. In 1980 the industries of developing countries exporting to OECD members would have incurred direct pollution control costs of $5.5 billion if they had been required to meet the environmental standard then prevailing in the United States, according to a study conducted for this Commission.[1] If the pollution control expenditure associated with the materials went into the final product are also counted, the costs would have mounted to $14.2 billion. The evidence also suggests that OECD imports from developing countries involve products that entail higher average environmental and resource damage costs than do overall OECD imports.[2] These hypothetical pollution control cost probably understate the real costs of environmental and resource damage in the exporting countries. Furthermore, these costs relate only to environmental pollution and not to the economic damage cost associated with resource depletion.
