Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday ventured into sugar country, where the Bush administration has taken a beating lately on trade policy.

In the final days leading to the election, Cheney stopped in Moorhead, where he tried to quell fears that the administration is willing to sacrifice the sugar industry in trade negotiations.

So he repeated himself often during a town hall meeting at the Alex Nemzek Fieldhouse on the Minnesota State University Moorhead campus.

"We're very sensitive on the sugar issue," Cheney said.

"We're certainly going to take care of sugar," he told about 1,000 people.

"We're very sensitive on the sugar front," he said.

The region's sugar beet growers and factory workers became vocal critics of the Bush administration's trade efforts in May, when negotiators finalized the U.S.- Central American Free Trade Agreement.

If passed by Congress, CAFTA would give six Central American countries greater access to the protected U.S. sugar market. The countries could import an additional 100,000 tons of sugar annually without paying tariffs.

Sugar industry officials say CAFTA and other trade agreements threaten to flood the U.S. market with subsidized foreign sugar.

Cheney said the Bush administration has excluded sugar in other bilateral trade agreements to avoid harming U.S. sugar producers.

He said Bush's negotiators are trying to forward trade policy that helps the nation's agriculture sector without sacrificing any one commodity.

U.S. trade officials have completed agreements with 12 countries. The bilateral trade pacts are expected to boost U.S. farm exports by about $2 billion dollars, U.S. Trade Ambassador Allen Johnson said in a news release.

The trade agreements will grow export markets for 90 percent of the nation's cash crops.

The Bush administration's efforts, however, haven't won over many of the region's sugar beet farmers and factory workers.

Members of a union that represents about 14,000 sugar factory workers in the Red River Valley and a few sugar beet farmers held a press conference at the Moorhead Public Library Monday. The farmers and factory workers urged voters to support Sen. John Kerry for president.

Kerry recently announced that he would scrap CAFTA if elected president.

"The agreement is bad for the economy and it's bad for one of the most important sources of jobs: the sugar industry," Kerry wrote in an Oct. 6 letter to Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn.

Cheney called Kerry a "Johnny come lately" who has a long track record of voting against sugar interests.

"I'd be wary of John Kerry," Cheney later said on WDAY's Hot Talk radio show.

The sugar industry has long argued that the global trade in sugar should be negotiated within the World Trade Organization.

Only the WTO can sort out the world's barriers to fair trade, local sugar industry officials say.

Cheney said Bush's negotiators prefer to handle trade differences within the WTO, but have sought bilateral agreements to help build international consensus.

Diane Ista, a staunch Democrat and sugar beet farmer from Ada, Minn., said Cheney's assurances fell short Monday.

"I think they would trade us away if they thought it would help them put together another agreement," Ista said at the sugar farmers-factory workers' press conference. "That would destroy sugar."

View All News