John Love, chairman of USDA's Interagency Sugar Estimates Committee, said that with ``sugarbeet acreage cutbacks in many states,'' the U.S. market could see ``a bullish trend in prices.'' Love said the price recovery is more likely if there is some drawdown in government-held stocks of sugar and if ``weather in the next six months is less than favorable for sugarcane or sugarbeets.''

Love said the sugarbeet acreage reduction is ``in line with a decline in the relative attractiveness of sugarbeets compared with other crops.'' Wholesale refined beet sugar prices have been running at 22-year lows through much of 2001, nearly 30 percent below levels that prevailed five years ago.

Love observed that, even with the sharp price drop of the past two years, the U.S. domestic sugar market is ``among least volatile in the world.'' On the world market, however, ``sugar is the most volatile of world traded commodities,'' with price gyrations exceeding those of ``coffee, cocoa, crude oil, gold, the major grains and oilseeds.''

Luther Markwart, chairman of the American Sugar Alliance, said, ``Mr. Love is correct in drawing the contrast between the domestic and world sugar markets. The domestic market has been remarkably stable during the nearly two decades U.S. sugar policy has been in place, to the benefit of American consumers and industrial sugar buyers. The world sugar market, on the other hand, is a thinly traded dump market for subsidized foreign surplus sugar. U.S. sugar policy shields American sugar farmers and consumers from subsidized foreign sugar and wildly gyrating prices.''

Markwart is also executive vice president of the American Sugarbeet Growers Association, representing 12,000 sugarbeet farmers and their families.

The American Sugar Alliance is a national coalition of growers, processors and refiners of sugarbeets, sugarcane and corn for sweetener.

For more information about U.S. sugar policy visit American Sugar Alliance at http://www.sugaralliance.org .