Declining agricultural prices preceded the Stock Market Crash of 1929, commonly associated with the start of the worldwide Great Depression that lasted through the 1930s.
[3] The trend became still more widespread when American Federation of Labor organized beet workers struck for higher wages in Blissfield Michigan in 1935.
Employer intimidation was commonplace and workers were often fined for made-up infractions so as not to receive even the low pay they had been promised.
4) To "stabilize" or limit sugar production in the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands at levels commensurate with US demand.
[7] According to Kent Hendrickson in 1964, the New Deal laws had a major impact on sugar beet farming in the Great Plains.
[8] Despite early recovery in Cuba, critics noted that the nature of the quota, which was reset each year and subject to considerable change, disrupted the whole of the Cuban economy, dominated as it was by the single crop.
Due to the high fixed cost of planting sugar cane, a planter would need several years to recover outlays and earn a profit.
Yet, with no guarantee of a market for additional sugar yields, investment was lower than it would have been under a system in which planters could make accurate long-term assessments of demand.
[9] Among the harshest criticisms was a 1961 allegation that the Jones-Costigan Act had established "a government-created cartel that goes well beyond the controls imposed in any other sector of American private enterprise.