DEAL SWEETENERS.(The Talk of the Town)

America has one heck of a sweet tooth. We consume more sweeteners per capita than any other country, and close to ten million tons of sugar every year. But American sugar producers aren't satisfied with supplying the most sweet-hungry population in the world. They've relentlessly sought--and received--special favors from the federal government, turning the industry into one of the most cosseted in America today. The government guarantees producers a fixed price for domestic sugar and sets strict quotas and tariffs for foreign sugar. Economically speaking, this has many obvious bad results. It keeps sugar prices in the U.S. at least twice as high as the world average. It makes it harder for companies that use lots of sugar to do business here--in the past decade, an exodus of candy manufacturers from the U.S. has eliminated thousands of jobs. And import restrictions make Third World countries poorer than they'd otherwise be. But protecting sugar also has a surprising consequence: it's hurting America's efforts to become more energy-efficient.

In recent years, as politicians have tried to deal with high gas prices, concerns about global warming, and America's dependence on OPEC, a new savior has been found: ethanol. Ethanol has all sorts of virtues. When it's blended with gasoline, it reduces greenhouse-gas emissions. Unlike fossil fuels, it doesn't get depleted over time, since it's made from biomass. And sources of ethanol can be found all over the world, unlike those of oil, which are mostly in unstable or autocratic countries that are unfriendly to the U.S. So Congress has mandated that four billion gallons of ethanol annually be blended with gasoline, and it also subsidizes ethanol production with a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax credit. These policies have stimulated an ethanol boom; the number of ethanol plants is set to rise by nearly fifty per cent in the next few years.

Unfortunately, the ethanol produced in the U.S. comes from a less-than-ideal source: corn. Corn ethanol's "net energy balance"--the amount of energy it yields in proportion to how much energy goes into its production--is significantly lower than that of other alternatives, and modern corn farming isn't easy on the land. By contrast, ethanol distilled from sugarcane is much cheaper to produce and generates far more energy per unit of input--eight times more, by most estimates--than corn does. In the nineteen-seventies, Brazil embarked on a program to substitute sugar ethanol for oil. Today, every gallon of gas in Brazil is blended with at least twenty per cent of ethanol, and many cars run on ethanol alone, at half the price of gasoline.

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not ...