Which One is More Harmful: Consuming Sugar or Privatizing Sugar Factories?

15 sugar factories belonging to the Institution of Turkish Sugar Factories will be privatized in this April. Let’s check the reasons of privatization first.

11 March 2018

Why are they going to be privatized?

Representatives of AKP government say that the factories lose money and are a burden on people’s back. To put it more clearly, they mean that it is more expensive to produce sugar out of beet other than starch or sugar cane and it causes people to pay for the cost as taxes. We do not exactly know how this damage is measured. We do not know if there is any damage at all.

 

Where to look for real public damage?

Dispossession:Privatizations in the past shows that privatized institutions were closed and disappeared within time. Privatizing sugar factories means paving the way for their closure. Giant corporates, which produce starch based sugar, like Cargill or Amylum can buy those institutions.

Loss of employment and income: Sector of sugar manufacturing out of beets helps millions of people to make their living. Employment rates will be narrowed due to the liquidation of the factories.

Foreign trade deficit: In order to produce sugar out of sugar cane, we need to import sugar canes and to produce starch based sugar, we need to import genetically modified corns. These imports will result in foreign exchange gap and public damage.

Increase in obesity rates: Obesity rates will dramatically increase if we start to consume starch based sugar instead of beet sugar. Only this problem itself would cause a huge public damage.

 

It is possible to produce the required amount of sugar from starch based sugar by closing every sugar factory, using imported corns and employing only a few hundred people. This privatization period we are in can easily cause destruction like that. Privatizing public institutions weakens the production capacity and variability of a society.

We should re-evaluate all these. Experts have been talking about how harmful consuming sugar is, but what about losing our economic self-sufficiencyand the results of that?