There’s the sugar rush, then the sugar crash. U.S. sugar policy is mostly about the crash, though. The maker of Oreo cookies announced last week it’s moving 600 jobs to Mexico, due to ridiculous U.S. sugar subsidies that drive up the cost of the sweet ingredient.

“New Jersey-based Mondelez International – formerly known as Kraft Foods Inc. – has said it will move production of Oreo cookies from its plant in southwest Chicago to its newest facility in Salinas, Mexico,” Global Trade Magazine reported. “According to analysts, the move by the multi-national company was spurred by soaring production costs caused by the prohibitively high price of imported sugar.”

As Bryan Riley explains for The Daily Signal, a news website run by the Heritage Foundation, U.S. trade barriers and subsidies mean that sugar costs twice as much for U.S. confectioners as it does elsewhere in the world.

“Sugar-using industries now have a big incentive to relocate from the United States to countries where access to their primary ingredient is not restricted,” he writes. “If the government wants people making Oreo cookies and similar products to keep their jobs, a logical starting point would be to eliminate the U.S. sugar program, including barriers to imported sugar.”

Predictably, many have responded to the news Oreo cookies will now be made in Mexico by demanding more trade restrictions.

“That’s backwards,” Riley says. “When protectionist policies like the U.S. sugar program lead to offshoring, the response shouldn’t be to pass new laws to discourage such offshoring or to raise tariffs even higher. The response should be to eliminate government policies that encourage offshoring in the first place.”

For decades, the federal sugar program has artificially kept the price of sugar excessively high. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it costs 37.5 cents to buy a pound of wholesale refined beet sugar in the United States, yet it only costs 19.2 cents for a pound of refined sugar on the world market.

That program is actually a combination of import restrictions, production quotas and loan programs dating to the 1930s, all designed to keep the price of American sugar well above that of the world market.

Why does it continue to exist, if it dates back to the 1930s?

“According to some of the program’s proponents, U.S. federal sugar policy protects jobs that would largely disappear without state intervention,” Heritage explained. “But a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce found that (f)or each one sugar growing and harvesting job saved through high U.S. sugar prices, nearly three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost.”

The American Sugar Alliance, the industry’s lobbying group, claims that 142,000 U.S. sugar workers are at risk, including 3,409 in Texas.

But those are theoretical job losses – which pale in comparison to the actual job losses we see in the confection industry.

Also, the quotas and guarantees the government provides to growers have discouraged efficiency; it’s quite likely those sugar producers could find ways to make their product more competitive with world markets.