A group of local sugar beet producers has rebuilt and reopened the Kaba Sugar Factory, one of the victims of predatory "foreign investors". The factory, which was built in Polish-Hungarian cooperation, had covered 1/4 of the domestic market, and was the largest in Hungary until purchased by Eastern Sugar, a UK-headquartered interest group. The "investors" massively downsized production to shore up their own production quotas within the EU, and ended up shutting it down in 2006 along with multiple other factories under their umbrella (including one in Slovakia and three in Czechia). With this and similar moves, sugar processing in Hungary was all but eliminated except for a single, small factory in domestic hands, and our EU production quotas were plundered by outsiders. After having been a net sugar exporter forever, we now had to import the sweet stuff even for domestic consumption. Now, after long negotiations and re-investment after the quotas were eliminated in 2017, the factory is once again in the right hands, set to produce sugar for the profit of local farmers.
