The sugar beet is yet another example of how diverging and sometimes contradictory agricultural objectives produce absurd results. This is largely driven by public funding and subsidies: as reported by «Schweizer Bauer», the federal government rewards farmers for not spraying their beet fields. The sugar industry does the exact opposite: it pays a dedicated premium for spraying

The Federal Subsidy Scheme: 800 Francs per Hectare for Forgoing Crop Protection

To understand how this situation arose, one must examine the federal direct payment system. A growing share of public funds is directed away from efficient food production toward purely ecological cultivation goals. The federal government pays beet growers 800 francs per hectare if they refrain entirely from using crop protection products. While beneficial for participating farmers, this policy compromises yields, quality, processing plants, taxpayers, and consumers alike.

Diluted IP Sugar: 15% Higher Energy Consumption and Declining Swissness

Beets grown without crop protection yield a lower sugar content. To extract the same amount of refined sugar, processing factories must handle a substantially higher volume of raw beets. Consequently, energy consumption per unit of recovered sugar increases by roughly 15%, according to the report in «Schweizer Bauer». Transport and processing workloads increase accordingly. Taxpayers fund a restriction whose value often dissolves on the market: only about half of the sugar produced without crop protection is sold at added value as IP-Suisse sugar, while the remainder is sold as conventional sugar. Concurrently, consumers lose part of domestic Swissness: the self-sufficiency rate for sugar has dropped below 50%. It is only above this benchmark that Swissness legislation mandates that manufacturers use higher proportions of domestic sugar to qualify their products as Swiss-made.

Industry Countermeasures: Special Premium for Targeted Crop Protection

To counteract this development, the sugar sector will pay a special premium of 5 francs per tonne in 2027—in addition to the base price of 43 francs—to all growers who maintain standard production and spray when necessary. The government and the private sector are effectively financing two competing premiums that cancel each other out. Kirsten Müller, Managing Director of the Association of Agricultural Contractors Switzerland, sums up the fundamental problem: «We are losing productivity due to misguided direct payments.» Yet the Swiss Federal Constitution explicitly mandates resource-efficient food production. Lukas Aebi, Head of Beet Management at Schweizer Zucker AG, underlines this point in the «Schweizer Bauer» article with regard to the increased energy demand: «This aspect must be included in a comprehensive sustainability assessment.»

Subsidising Avoidable Crop Losses Promotes Food Waste in the Field

Subsidising avoidable crop losses actively drives food waste directly in the field. The current direct payment framework contradicts the goal Switzerland should strive for: comprehensive agricultural sustainability—which means using available acreage with high resource efficiency while deploying other resources such as water, fertiliser, crop protection products, energy, labour, and financial capital as efficiently as possible. Federal policy must align with this benchmark. The current situation in sugar beet cultivation completely contradicts this objective.

Keywords: Sugar beets · Direct payments · Crop protection · Schweizer Zucker AG · Disincentives · Swissness · IP-Suisse · Agricultural policy