Louisiana sugar cane farmers want a stalemated Congress to pass the Farm Bill. Here's why.

WASHINGTON — Vermilion Parish sugar cane farmer Kyle Zenon put on his Sunday church suit to haunt the halls of Capitol Hill in a quest to push a gridlocked Congress into passing the stalled Farm Bill.

Though subsidies, loans, insurance and other measures handled in the Farm Bill are important to all farmers in Louisiana, it's the legislation's "sugar policy" that worries Zenon.

"Without a safety net, the sugar industry in Louisiana — not just Louisiana but in Florida and Texas too — the domestic sugar industry will collapse," said the 31-year-old Zenon, whose family has grown sugar cane on the same farm for five generations. "I'm a young grower. I took over from my father who took over from his father. I want my son to take over from me."

The Farm Bill is a roadmap for how the agricultural industry operates over the next five years. The authorization for the current Farm Bill expired Oct. 1 and was supposed to be renewed last year. But the deadline was punted several times and now lands after the November presidential and congressional elections.

The import limits, guaranteed prices and loans that have kept 230 years of Louisiana tradition alive were enacted in 1981, when sugar cane farms and mills were on the verge of collapse because of cheap foreign imports.

But the sugar policy is always under attack. Every five years when Congress enacts a new Farm Bill, candy makers and other manufacturers try to change or get rid of the sugar policy. Opponents show studies that find the protections annually tack on about $3.5 billion to consumer costs — an annual $40 hidden tax on a family of four that on average doubles the price of a 4-pound bag of sugar.

In 2018, keeping the "sugar policy" was the main stumbling block to passing that year's Farm Bill.

This time around, the key disagreement stalling the Farm Bill is food stamps. The sugar policy was changed in the $1.5 trillion House version, which cleared the Agriculture Committee on May 24.

Louisiana Agriculture and Forestry Commissioner Mike Strain, the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation and the American Sugar Cane League have all said they approve of the sugar policy changes in the House version. Even the historic advocate for removing the sugar policy, the Alliance for Fair Sugar Policy, a coalition of manufacturers, retailers and food and beverage companies, OK'd the changes.

But the Farm Bill has a long way to go before reaching the president's desk. Given the history of messing with sugar policy to secure votes, nothing guarantees that the version in the House bill will be the final one.

The bill needs to pass the full House, where a vote hasn't been set yet. The chambers' two top leaders, who would schedule the vote, are both Republicans from Louisiana — Speaker Mike Johnson of Benton and Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Jefferson. Neither responded to questions about when that vote might occur.

The House version is only part of the equation. The Senate has its own draft of the Farm Bill, which the Senate Agriculture Committee is expected to take up soon.

Once the full House and Senate pass their own versions, the two chambers must negotiate a single measure that a majority in both chambers can support. But a vote on the final version for the president to sign into law for the next five years is not expected before the November elections. The bill might not even get passed before this Congress adjourns in December. That would force the newly elected Congress to start over after taking their oaths of office in January.

French priests first planted cane in 1751 near Baronne Street in New Orleans. Sugar was Louisiana's first major source of wealth, long before oil and tourism.

It's no longer the cornerstone of Louisiana's economy, and the industry no longer has the political clout it once did, nor the sharply dressed lobbyists in Congress.

But sugar cane is still a vital Louisiana economic cog — in some parishes the main source of income.

The 2022 harvest produced more than 17 million tons of cane and two million tons of raw sugar. Louisiana's sugar cane growers and millers produce 20% of America's sugar supply, said Jim Simon, of the American Sugar Cane League.

Sugar cane employs 19,600 people and has a $4.2 billion economic impact in Louisiana, according to the LSU Ag Center. Pointe Coupee is now the largest sugarcane-producing parish in the state, with Iberia Parish second.

"It's so important that the sugar policy remains intact because our farmers are so dependent on it," said U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, a Republican from Start.

The Farm Bill authorizes the U.S. Department of Agriculture to track sugar consumption and allot each state a production quota.

"By managing the sugar supplies, we don't oversupply our markets," said Strain, Louisiana's agriculture commissioner.

The government also guarantees a loan rate at 19.7 cents per pound for unrefined raw sugar that is reserved to be bought as needed to refine into white sugar, Strain said.

Interest-bearing loans, which last nine months, help the farmers pay their bills and get started on the following year's crop while awaiting the sale of the current year's sugar. The price of domestic sugar was 37.4 cents a pound on Thursday. The loan rate guarantees that farmers will receive at least 19.7 cents should the market drop, Strain said.

Internationally the price of sugar is now 18 to 19 cents a pound. Many poorer countries lack social safety net programs but do subsidize sugar production as a jobs program, which creates lots of sugar at a low price, said Brian Breaux, commodity and public policy director for the Louisiana Farm Bureau Federation.

"Other countries that produce more than they need put the excess on the dump market. So a lot of people in Congress look at that and think that the price of sugar is cheaper than it is," Breaux said. "The sugar policy puts us in the trade arena on a level playing field."

The House version of the Farm Bill would revamp how the quota is set for raw cane sugar and increase the loan rate in stages from 19.7 cents to 32 cents by 2025, among other things.

"It does nothing to the cost of sugar," Strain said. "It just resets the safety net to better reflect the increased costs of production."

Sugar policy takes up only a dozen pages in the 942-page House Farm bill. The main argument holding up its passage is not sugar but food stamps.

Funded through the Farm Bill, the food stamp program feeds about 41 million people nationwide. About 801,000 people, roughly 18% of Louisiana residents, rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, called SNAP or food stamps.

Republicans want work requirements for food stamp recipients and argue states should get a set amount of money and then decide how much recipients should get and for how long.

That's a nonstarter for Democrats.

"We should not have to choose between helping our farmers or feeding hungry children," said U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, a Democrat from New Orleans who co-chairs the congressional sugar caucus. "While the updated sugar policy provisions are crucial for increasing loan rates to support sugar cane producers, Republicans included too many poison pill provisions in the rest of the text for this to move forward."

The right-wing House Freedom Caucus wants steep cuts to SNAP. U.S. Rep. Clay Higgins, a Lafayette Republican who is the sole Freedom Caucus member from Louisiana, did not respond to requests for comment.