He envisions expansion from 10,000 acres now to 30,000, most
of it near the proposal to build in Lambton County near Sarnia.
Lumley has worked with the Michigan Sugar Cooperative to
persuade Ontario farmers to resume growing the crop and marketing it to the
cooperative’s plants in Michigan.
He talks about forming an alliance, or contract, with the
Michigan Sugar Cooperative to build the plant in Ontario.
The Michigan cooperative recently announced an ambitious
plan to expand processing capacity at its three plants.
Ontario once had a thriving sugar beet industry, including
processing plants in many communities in Southwestern Ontario.
The biggest were in the Chatham area, but there was even one
in Kitchener when it was still called Berlin.
The Ontario industry went into spectacular bankruptcy in the
mid-1960s and was a political hot potato as growers sought compensation for
their losses.
Ontario was home to Redpath, a sugar refining company with
major facilities on the Toronto waterfront. It consistently turned a profit,
mainly by importing cheap sugar from the Caribbean to refine for Canadian
customers.
The United States maintained relatively high sugar prices by
holding a high tariff against imports;sugar was much more expensive in the U.S.
than Canada.
Today the U.S. farm bill continues to coddle the sugar
industry price support through preferential loan agreements, domestic
market controls and tariff-rate quotas.
That high price also resulted in keen competition, including
the development of a high-fructose corn syrup sweetener industry and a huge
market for Canadian cookies, most of them baked in Kitchener and Cambridge.
What remains to be seen is whether the U.S. can maintain a
relatively high price for sugar – and therefore a strong demand for sugar beets
at the Michigan Sugar Cooperative – or if free trade with low-cost suppliers
such as Cuba will reduce U.S. sugar prices.
