The US Department of Agriculture has raised sugar loan rates for the 2026 crop and set fiscal year 2027 marketing allotments for the beet and cane industries through the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC), Farms.com reports.
The national average loan rate rises to 24.00 cents per pound for raw cane sugar and 32.77 cents for refined beet sugar, under provisions of the Working Families Tax Cuts Act. The loans give processors short-term finance so harvested sugar can be stored when prices are weak and sold later; they are available from 1 October 2026 and run for nine months or to the end of the fiscal year, whichever comes first.
Rates vary by region with transport and marketing costs. For refined beet sugar California gets the highest, 34.08 cents, with Minnesota and eastern North Dakota at 32.63 cents and Idaho, Oregon and Washington at 32.53 cents. For raw cane sugar Florida's rate is 22.84 cents and Louisiana's 25.07 cents. Processors taking CCC loans must pay cane growers at least $33.58 a ton in Florida and $39.17 a gross ton in Louisiana for fiscal 2027.
The overall fiscal 2027 marketing allotment is 10.57 million short tons, raw value, 85 percent of USDA's forecast domestic consumption of 12.44 million short tons in the September 2026 WASDE report. Beet sugar gets 5.75 million short tons (54.35 percent) and cane 4.83 million (45.65 percent).
Hawaii left commercial sugar production in 2017 and Puerto Rico has also exited, so their reserved shares were spread among mainland cane states, and Texas' share was redistributed because it stopped producing sugar during fiscal 2025. USDA said Louisiana, the only state where farm-level proportionate shares can apply, will not need them in fiscal 2027 because its cane sector is not expected to fill its allotment. The agency also reassigned some fiscal 2026 allocations between processors without changing sector totals.
Photo: Kolforn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: Farms.com
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