Tate & Lyle actively campaigned for Brexit.
We already have no tariffs on 'fair trade' cane sugar from poor nations.T&L cut their supplies from these countries 10 years ago.
Slightly different perspective here:
2016 -
"Years of lobbying the Commission couldn't crack the EU's uneven handling of the two crops that produce sugar: cane and beet.Brussels slaps high tariffs on sugar cane imports while simultaneously subsidizing the beet crop used by Tate & Lyle's competitors.The situation is only set to deteriorate once national beet sugar production caps end in 2017.This will free beet farmers to expand their businesses while import tariffs remain intact for cane refiners."
"The EU is a sugar-producing anomaly: Some 80 percent of the world's sugar is produced from cane, a tall grass that grows mostly in the tropics.The rest from comes from sugar beet—a root shaped like a fat parsnip—of which the EU produces the lion's share."
"Today [2016], most sugar beet grows in a Northern European arc that runs from Britain to Poland.The growers receive EU subsidies and, if they stick to their production quotas, have prices guaranteed at €26.29 per metric ton. In turn, businesses that rely on sugar cane have to shoulder heavy import duties from outside the EU."
"Tate & Lyle ran a loss of €25 million in 2015, and added that operating costs were inflated by €40 million last year because of the tariffs." ...
"The cane refining sector attributes the troubles to the EU's reforms of its sugar policy in 2006."
"The Commission's measures cushioned beet producers while also changing the EU sugar import regime in a way that can be bad for refiners.The reforms removed barriers to cane imports from a set of poor countries, including Mozambique and Cambodia.The Commission did the same for imports from slightly more competitive producer nations like Jamaica—but with limits on the amount they could export to the EU because of fears they would flood the market."
"In reality, these countries have stopped exporting so much to the EU.The EU sugar price had been artificially high for decades, and orienting the beet sector toward the market brought that price down. This weakened the economic incentives poorer countries had to export to the EU, when they could just as easily sell their sugar elsewhere and for a similar price.The final result was that less raw sugar from developing countries came into the EU, and cane refiners were forced to source their sugar from bigger economies such as Brazil and Australia at a higher price."
www.politico.eu/article/brexit-after-brexit-the-sugar-rush-uk-sugar-cane-refiners/
2017 - "Brussels is keeping punitive tariffs on imported cane sugar–in a bitter development for one of the oldest names in the British sweetening industry, Tate & Lyle Sugars."
"Tate & Lyle claims its raw material bill is inflated by €40m a year due to EU tariffs and quotas. In theory, it is still allowed to import zero-tariff sugar from a handful of designated markets such as Fiji, Belize and Guyana and that are seen as supporting international development goals. But in practice, Tate & Lyle executives claim that this restricts its ability to tap into the global market price and says the EU-generated cost on each of the giant cargo ships that pull up at its wharf on the Thames can reach €2-3m a time."
www.theguardian.com/business/2017/mar/27/brexit-sugar-beet-cane-tate-lyle-british-sugar