WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress is hoping that an ethanol industry with an endless appetite for corn will have a sweet tooth, too.

Under the farm bill the House passed last month, the federal government would buy surplus sugar and sell it to ethanol producers, where it would be used in a mixture with corn. The program was inserted as a hedge against a looming North American Free Trade Agreement provision, which will allow Mexico to export unlimited amounts of sugar to the U.S. starting next year.

The U.S. sugar program currently props up sugar prices through a combination of price guarantees and import quotas. Once the limit on Mexican imports expires, the government could be faced with a price-depressing glut of sugar, which in turn would likely lead to taxpayer-funded government purchases of surplus sugar.

The chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, Minnesota Democrat Collin Peterson, inserted the sugar-to-ethanol provision in the farm bill. Minnesota is the nation's largest producer of sugar beets, and Peterson represents the state's sugar beet-growing Red River Valley.

The sugar-to-ethanol program would only kick in when imports lead to an oversupply of sugar in the U.S.

The Bush administration doesn't think much of the sugar-to-ethanol idea. Mark Keenum, agriculture undersecretary for farm and foreign agricultural services, said the Department of Agriculture tried to sell 100,000 tons of surplus sugar in 2001 for ethanol, but was only able to sell 10,000 tons - and at a significant loss, because it couldn't get as much money as it paid for the sugar.

"It's going to take some amount of subsidy in order to get the plants to use it," Peterson said.