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Abstract

Since 1987 the U.S. Congress has considered two pieces of legislation designed to address some of the inequities in the original Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act (part of the Caribbean Basin Initiative or CBI). Both pieces of legislation included modifications for the sugar import quota program. In 1987 House Resolution (H.R.) 3101 proposed relaxing CBI sugar import quotas back to the 1983/84 level of 1,123,782 short tons raw value (s.t.r.v.); the Congressional session ended, however, before action was taken on this bill. In 1989 a modified version of the bill, known as the CBI-II legislation, was introduced under H.R. 1233. The modifications focused largely on the textile and sugar provisions of the original bill in response to concerns expressed by domestic textile and sugar industry organizations; instead of providing any increase in sugar import quotas for the region, the legislation proposed a "quota floor" of 409,448 s.t.r.v. for Caribbean Basin sugar imports while allowing a quota of 429,151 s.t.r.v. to remain in effect for 1989. A welfare analysis of these two sugar import quota policy options was conducted based on the corn and sweetener model developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Results indicate that relaxing U.S. sugar import quotas to Caribbean Basin sugar exporting countries back to 1983/84 levels would generate net domestic gains and net overall program gains as well as gains to the beneficiary countries potentially in excess of those provided by the entire CBI program.

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