The House Agriculture subcommittee that deals with specialty crops, rural development and foreign agriculture is scheduled mark up the sugar program soon. Almost nothing more forcefully symbolizes the challenge to reform the 2007 Farm Bill than the decision that has been made by the committee leadership to just extend the current program for the next five years.

Sugar is perhaps the most protected item in American agriculture. There's an elaborate system that keeps the prices that are paid by American consumers and sugar-using industries artificially high - two to three times the world price. If the price ever drops below a fixed level, imports from countries that can produce sugar more efficiently and more cheaply are severely restricted. Anything above a tiny amount of sugar entering the country is subjected to a 100% tax.

This system translates into very substantial costs to the consumer and businesses - nearly $2 billion, according to one study by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office. This suggests that the American economy as a whole would be significantly better off if the whole program were scrapped, just wiping out all the winners and losers and special benefits.

The impact on the economy extends far beyond subsidies. We lost thousands of sugar-using jobs, for instance, when candy manufacturers left New England and Chicago for Canada because the cost of the basic sugar their industry needs was so much cheaper north of the border. If we're concerned about overall employment in the American economy, there are about 10 times as many jobs in the sugar-using industry as there are in this artificially protected industry growing both cane and beet sugar.

There are other costs as well. As cane sugar production skyrocketed in Florida near the Everglades , from less than 70,000 acres in the early 1960s to over 450,000 today, there have been severe environmental consequences. The encroachment of cane sugar production and the runoff into the Everglades is one of the reasons that the federal government is spending $8 billion cleaning up and trying to restore the ecological damage to this national treasure.

Other agricultural industries have also paid a price for our protecting sugar in each of our trade agreements. Because it's the most protected trade item, the United States, in negotiating trade agreements, has made exceptions for the sugar industry that have harmed other industries and consumers. To protect sugar interests, the US allowed Australia to protect its cattle industry, which has hurt American cattlemen.

It also hurts poor countries. Most of the other countries in the world that are natural producers of sugar are much poorer than the United States . So we are discriminating against some of the poorest in an industry that could help countries raise their citizens out of poverty - all while we protect a few and penalize many in the United States.

The fundamental question is why? If it costs money, if it costs jobs, if we're worse off as an economy, why does United States continue to pursue a policy that creates problems for us with the environment, international trade, and the sugar using industry? The answer is politics. The people involved with the sugar growing industry invest a small percentage but a significant amount of dollars of their sugar profits in keeping things just the way they are. Even though sugar represents perhaps 1 percent of the agriculture production, it makes 17 percent of agriculture's political contributions.

And it goes far beyond campaign cash - although don't underestimate that impact - that flows to both parties as well as individual candidates. This sugar "lobby" is a vast array of trade associations on the regional, state, and national level. They employ an army of sophisticated public relations people, trade association executives and lobbyists. I have often thought that if we could mobilize the support that the sugar lobby has to nourish poor children rather than the sugar industry, no kid would ever go to school hungry in this country again.

I've tried in the past to challenge this cozy, costly arrangement with amendments on the House floor and it has been, to say the very least, tough sledding. Public outrage, or at least some public attention, would help get some traction.

As we look at a the wide range of items embedded in the farm bill, and even more at the wide range of things that are not in the Farm Bill, we will need to make some hard tactical decisions about how much energy should be invested in what is always an uphill battle. It's one of the reasons why it's so important to have these conversations, because all of us are going to have to pick our spots. Sugar, whether it's reformed or not, will remain a focal point, a textbook case on how special advantage is gained and maintained and the difficulty in making changes that will benefit the environment, consumers and the world.