Dianne Feinstein: “I thank Senator Reid, and I thank Senators Harkin and Lugar as well. On Friday, I offered an amendment to the sugar…”

“I thank Senator Reid, and I thank Senators Harkin and Lugar as well. On Friday, I offered an amendment to the sugar program, which really is a minor amendment, with one exception. It seems anything that has anything to do with the sugar program is frozen and can't be changed. As I noted 6 years ago when I came here, the sugar program works to the great detriment of America's domestic sugar refineries. The largest of those domestic sugar refineries happens to be in California. It is C&H Sugar. C&H got most of its sugar from Hawaii, and they used to have ads as I grew up: C&H pure cane sugar from Hawaii. It is a plant that can employ about 1,300 people. It can refine about 800,000 pounds of sugar. It is a union plant. It is the only source of employment, the major source of employment, in a small town in the East Bay known as Crockett. You drive over the Carquinez Bridge and you see this big old plant, and that is from where this wonderful sugar comes. The problem has been, year after year, C&H cannot buy enough sugar to refine. Why? Because the allotments in the sugar program were more than two decades ago. They do not adequately reflect who is buying and who is selling sugar at the time. The amendment I have offered would simply reallocate the unfilled portion of a country's quota when that country does not fulfill its quota. That is all it does. This is less than 3 percent of the sugar.”