European Sugar Market - Impact of Quota System

Abstract

The European agricultural market has been criticized for its heavy regulations and subsidization. The sugar market is one of the most regulated ones; however, this will change radically in 2017 when the current system of production quotas will end. The aim of this paper is to present the basic characteristics of the EU quota sugar market. The analysis identifi es the main drivers of EU sugar market and their position within the EU sugar market. The paper identifi es especially those drivers/ companies/alliances which take control over the EU sugar production realized under the quota production system. The paper also highlights the level of EU sugar market concentration and also identifi es those countries and companies which are the main leaders in the sugar production area realized under the quota system. Based on the results deriving from the paper, it is possible to characterize the EU sugar market as a heavily concentrated one -nearly 75% (10 mil. tonnes) of the quota is controlled by fi ve multinational companies only; these companies are operating more than 50% of all the available sugar plants located in the EU. These multinational alliances are also in control of the production capacities of their subsidiaries. In most countries, this causes serious problems as the given quota is controlled by one or two producers only. The EU sugar market is extremely concentrated especially if we take into consideration the location of each alliance's headquarters. The majority of production capacities are under (the) control of especially German and French companies. These two countries are also the main benefi ciaries in relation to the EU sugar production quota system.

Previsão do Preço do Açúcar: Uma Análise Comparativa entre Modelo Linear e Redes Neurais

“…A partir do século XV, tal produto exerceu grande influência em diversas economias do mundo [1], [2]. Hoje representa um importante ativo para as economias de diversos países e um dos produtos mais regulamentados nos mercados internacionais [3].…”

Polish Sugar Industry Development

“…On the other hand, it resulted in considerable concentration of production capacities among subjects that successfully passed the transformation phase. Observed concentration is a general characteristic of the whole EU sugar industry (Benešová et al, 2015). Although many improvements were implemented by Polish sugar industry, still there are problems to be solved -for example logistics (Polowczyk and Baum, 2016) or observed slowdown in investments (Szajner, 2016).…”

Czech and Polish Sugar Industry – Concentration of Sugar Production

“…On the other hand, reforms led to increased efficiency and intensity in production (Benešová et al, 2015;Artyszak et al, 2017;Molas et al 2017). Contrary to improved situation in production efficiency, sugar reforms led to market concentration in the EU and the market is becoming more and more dominated by few players mainly from Germany, France, Netherlands (Rezbova et al, 2015).…”