Bitter Sweets
A Politically Connected Industry Devastates the Everglades
By Ted LevinStaining an otherwise cerulean sky, oily black smoke
billows a mile high from more than half a dozen fires south of Lake
Okeechobee. You can see the smoke from West Palm Beach, like the
exhalations of detonated bombs. It is eerily quiet.
From the highway around the lake, from the outskirts of towns such as
Canal Point, Moore Haven and Harlem (where they hold the Miss Brown
Sugar Contest), sugarcane runs to the horizon, a ghostly replacement of
what was once sawgrass marshes. Flames rush through patches of cane,
burning off extraneous tassels and blades, leaving only the sucrose-rich
stalks. You can hear the fires cackle from the streets of Clewiston,
“America’s Sweetest Town.” Since 1931, it has been home to the U.S.
Sugar Corporation, one of the oldest and largest players in the sugar
industry, an industry that survives on our insatiable appetite for
things sweet and on political largesse. It is in fact the industry that
dictated the direction of the $8 billion Everglades restoration project.
Last spring, in a bravura display of clout, the industry succeeded in
ramming a sweetheart deal through the Florida legislature that gives Big
Sugar more time to clean up its act. The measure, enthusiastically
signed by Governor Jeb Bush, pushes back a looming 2006 water cleanup
deadline to 2016, and, even as amended in a last-minute deal, gives
sugar companies until 2017 to pay a cleanup tax. “Big Sugar is not only
raping the resource; it expects breakfast in the morning,” wrote Orlando
Sentinel columnist Mike Thomas.
SWEET DEALS
A region larger than the state of Rhode Island, the upper quarter of
the original Everglades is more than 700,000 acres of cane fields,
winter vegetables and a few sod farms. It is officially called the
Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA), but it is known simply as Big Sugar.
Every fourth teaspoon of sugar consumed in the United States is grown
here. “Big” stands for it’s political power, hard to explain, given its
relative insignificance on the global economic stage.
Between 1988 and 1994 Big Sugar made more than $5.5 million in
campaign contributions, far out of proportion to its size; in 1999 sugar
baron Alfonso (“Alfy”) Fanjul Jr. hosted a $25,000-a-plate dinner to
support the Florida Democratic Party; 60 guests attended, including Bill
Clinton. In the agricultural sector, only the tobacco industry spends
more on campaign contributions and lobbying efforts. During a 1994
Florida statehouse debate on an environmental referendum that would have
taxed farmers a penny for every pound of sugar milled in the EAA, more
than 30 industry lobbyists convened in Tallahassee.
Alfy and Pepe Fanjul never intended to farm in Florida. After four
generations in Cuba, where their family empire included 150,000 acres of
cane, 10 sugar mills and three alcohol distilleries, their businesses
were nationalized by Fidel Castro in 1959. Moving from Cuba to Palm
Beach in 1960, Alfonso Fanjul Sr. and some fellow exiles bought a
4,000-acre parcel of farmland in the Everglades for $640,000.
Florida offered low taxes for land and water, and at an annual
expense of more than $50 million to the American taxpayers, Washington
kept the Everglades drained in the wet season and irrigated in the dry.
In 1970 the Fanjuls created Flo-Sun. After the death of their father 10
years later, Alfy and Pepe inherited the business. By 1990 the Fanjuls
farmed 180,000 acres in the Everglades and 160,000 acres in the
Dominican Republic. Today, their farms and four mills produce about a
million tons of raw sugar a year; their refinery markets white and
organic sugar directly to consumers under the name Florida Crystals.
So pronounced is the Fanjuls’ effect on regional politics and
Everglades issues that the movie Striptease, in part a satire of the
sugar industry, based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel, lampoons brothers Joaquin
and Wilbur Rojo, who bear some similarities to Alfy and Pepe. The
Fanjuls allegedly were incensed and offended by any comparison to the
fictional Rojos, who attempted murder to protect their business empire.
United States tariffs and price controls keep domestic sugar prices
around 22 cents a pound. Most of the rest of the world sells sugar for
eight cents a pound. In 1998, sugar-grower price supports in effect cost
Americans $1.4 billion in higher prices for candy, cookies, soda, ice
cream, gum and a host of other sweet things from cereal to catsup. That
same year, the Fanjuls enjoyed more than $60 million in subsidies, which
led Time to suggest that they may be the “first family of corporate
welfare.”
With so much help, it is no wonder that the Fanjuls are one of the
wealthiest families in the United States and that cane farms have spread
across marginal land, wetlands better left to alligators and to the
preservation of the region’s long-term water regime. According to James
Bovard of the libertarian Cato Institute, “Paying lavish subsidies to
produce sugar in Florida makes as much sense as creating a federal
subsidy program to grow bananas in Massachusetts.” According to Bovard,
the only thing that will make Everglades cane farmers competitive would
be massive global warming.
Robert Kennedy, Jr., whose father and uncle had befriended the
Fanjuls, has lambasted the sugar barons. “Under the current system,”
Kennedy wrote in a letter, “individuals like yourself can pilfer
America’s natural wealth and heritage, destroy publicly owned resources,
garner subsidies in the form of below-cost natural resources and
artificial price controls, poison our rivers and streams, mistreat
workers and then protect [your] place at the public trough by sharing
[your] loot with public officials with payoffs disguised as campaign
contributions.”
Some environmentalists are even in bed with Big Sugar. The Charles
Stewart Mott Foundation, a generous supporter of environmental causes—it
spent $800,000 in the 1990s to protect a South American wetland—still
has financial and managerial control of U.S. Sugar, which in 1996 spent
$3 million to defeat amendments to protect the Everglades. The
foundation declined to comment on its involvement with U.S. Sugar.
CANE POLITICS
Modern sugarcane is a complex hybrid of towering perennial grasses in
the genus Saccharum. Of the six known species, four are domesticated.
Sugarcane was discovered in Southeast Asia about 10,000 years ago, when
Florida was a wide, arid Ice Age landscape. It has been boiled for syrup
for more than 2,000 years. Florida is a far cry from being prime cane
habitat. Restricted by a frostier climate and wetter, nutrient-poor
soils, farmers in the Everglades spend $150 more to produce a metric ton
of raw sugar than do farmers in Australia.
Shortly after Columbus reached the New World, the commercial growth
of cane became extremely important in the Caribbean, where African
slaves were brought to toil in the fields. In the shameless “triangle of
trade,” raw sugar from the British Caribbean colonies was shipped to
England for refining, then the ships went to Africa to exchange goods
for slaves, who were shipped to the Caribbean.
The Seminole grew cane on secret hammocks in the Everglades, and
pioneer families from Homosassa to Flamingo grew small plots of cane.
Florida’s interest in growing sugar in a region that is not suitable
without subsidies and tariffs remained a homegrown affair until 1920,
and it did not really take off until the Fanjuls arrived. Sugarcane
failed as a commercial crop in Florida several times in the 18th
century. By the early 1900s only 13,000 acres of cane were grown in the
entire state, mostly for syrup.
Then came large-scale draining. Big land companies, such as Florida
Fruit Lands and Everglades Plantation, bought tracts of undeveloped
wetlands and then sold more than 18,000 parcels to unsuspecting buyers,
mostly in 10-acre chunks, usually sight unseen. Settlers found that
clearing the thick swamp vegetation was an arduous task that involved
sawing, chopping, hacking, pulling, rooting, cutting, prying, yanking,
splitting and finally burning. Three and a half months was required to
clear a little more than an acre. Plowing, too, was torturous. Draft
animals sank into the soft, wet muck.
By 1917, the four large muck-dredged canals that dissected the
Everglades, together with the Caloosahatchee River, dropped Okeechobee
from about 22 feet above sea level to between 17 and 19. Water receded
below the surface of the Everglades until finally the land was ready for
cultivation by large, politically connected, corporate-scale farms.
Sugarcane was one of the first crops grown on large parcels.
DISRUPTING THE NATURAL CYCLE
Sugarcane cultivation is out of sync with South Florida’s natural
cycles. Because Big Sugar must remain dry in the wet season, every day
more than a billion gallons of water is diverted away from the
Everglades. By a year’s end three to four million acre-feet—enough to
submerge Connecticut beneath a foot of water—have been stolen from the
Everglades. Starved for freshwater, Florida Bay has turned dangerously
saline, and the central Everglades remains perpetually flooded.
An important point that bears repeating is that the Everglades is a
nutrient-poor, though not unproductive, wetland. Sawgrass thrives in the
glades because low levels of phosphorous (an important plant nutrient)
inhibit the growth of more aggressive species, such as cattails. Ron
Jones, a microbiologist at Florida International University who for
years has testified against Big Sugar, claims that the Everglades’
natural level of phosphorous is a measly five to seven parts per
billion, equivalent to about 50 drops in an Olympic swimming pool.
Spreading phosphorus on the cane fields is a common practice in the
Everglades. Phosphorous-rich water from the Everglades was regularly
back-pumped into Lake Okeechobee until 1979, exacerbating the lake’s
nutrient overload. To reduce the lake’s nutrient level, the South
Florida Water Management District began pumping untreated farm runoff
into the central Everglades.
The phosphorous infusion at first caused sawgrass to grow rapidly and
abnormally large; then it died and gave way to cattails, which usurp 50
acres of sawgrass a day. Today, more than 50,000 acres of cattails have
spread across the water conservation areas, filling in portions of the
central Everglades, crowding out willow and bay, excluding fish. Wading
birds have no place to feed, no place to land. Normally a benign and
localized native, cattails were formerly restricted to sites with
natural pulses of nutrients: the edges of alligator holes, downstream
from heron rookeries, and in recent burns. But now, says Jones,
“Cattails are the grave marker of a dying ecosystem.”
IGNORING THE LAW
In 1988, United States Attorney Dexter Leitinen filed a lawsuit
against the South Florida Water Management District and the Florida
Department of Environmental Regulation for not enforcing the state’s
water quality standards—for looking the other way as phosphorous poured
out of the Everglades. Two and a half years later, Florida’s newly
elected governor, Lawton Chiles, walked into a federal court saying,
“I’ve brought my sword. Whom do I surrender to,” conceding that the
state needed to enforce its own laws. By the summer of 1991 Governor
Chiles and Dick Thornburgh, the United States attorney general, began
working on a timetable to clean up the Everglades. A new state law gave
the South Florida Water Management District the power to impose taxes on
sugar farmers to pay for their cleanup costs.
The settlement allowed for future expansion of the artificial marsh,
if needed, and set preliminary water standards to be met by 1997, when
farmers would be required to cut phosphorous discharge by 10 percent.
Long-term goals called for a further reduction of 25 percent. The water
quality lawsuit had cost Florida $6 million.
Sugar fought back, filing more than a dozen lawsuits. During the 1992
Presidential campaign, the Fanjuls split their political allegiances:
Pepe chaired the Bush-Quayle Finance Committee, and Alfy led Clinton
into the heart of the Cuban-American community, a Republican stronghold.
Four months after Clinton’s victory, Alfy Fanjul gave a blueprint for
Everglades restoration that had been prepared by Flo-Sun scientists to
Bruce Babbitt, the secretary of the interior. Two years later, at the
urging of Fanjul, Babbitt turned the Everglades cleanup over to the
state legislature, where Big Sugar held all the trump cards. The coterie
of three dozen lobbyists the companies employed to represent them in
Tallahassee included two former state house speakers and Governor
Chiles’s former campaign manager and chief of staff. Sugar blitzed the
media, downplaying the phosphorous problem, claiming disingenuously that
rainwater had far more phosphorous than the goal set for Everglades
runoff.
In 1994, to the dismay of Florida legislators, the then-103-year-old
Marjory Stoneman Douglas, author of The Everglades: River of Grass
and a leading force in protecting the wetlands for more than 50 years,
publicly demanded that her name be stricken from the Marjory Stoneman
Douglas Everglades Forever Act of 1994 because she felt that the state
had retreated from its commitment to restore the ecosystem.
Later that year, Governor Chiles signed an amended version of the
Everglades Forever Act that suspended state water quality standards
until 2003 and empowered state officials, not federal scientists, to
determine allowable phosphorous levels. The act also capped Big Sugar’s
cleanup costs at $320 million. Again, taxpayers would pay the
difference, estimated at more than $400 million.
KILLING THE EVERGLADES
In the past 75 years more than six feet of peat has disappeared from
the Everglades. Farmers may soon strike bedrock. The soils of the
Everglades were formed underwater, in the absence of oxygen and
oxygen-loving microorganisms, whose voracious appetites would have
consumed the gathering mess of stems, leaves, roots and rhizomes.
Because periodic, often prolonged flooding held aerobic microbes at bay,
peat deposits built up. A positive feedback loop was created: peat,
covering the limestone bedrock, built deep deposits that were supported,
and in turn nourished, by a sea of sawgrass.
When canals dropped the water table below the surface, and the
sawgrass was cleared, the peat dried, shrank and blew away, or burnt
like a cigar, smoldering for months and years, filling the sky with
smoke. Worse, the dry soil oxidized, as hungry aerobic bacteria gorged.
Already the rate of soil subsidence in the Everglades has reached one
inch a year.
The path of the surplus water draining from the Everglades is so
crucial to its health that then-Vice President Al Gore promised that
restoration would include the recovery of at least an additional 100,000
acres of cane fields for water storage. According to reports, after one
phone call from Alfy Fanjul to the White House, the purchase of more
Everglades land was dropped from the restoration plan.
During a meeting at Flo-Sun’s Okeelanta sugar mill, the late Peter
Rosendahl, a hydrologist, Raul Perdomo, an agronomist in charge of sugar
products, and Flo-Sun spokesperson Jorge Dominicus field questions. They
unequivocally believe that the Everglades Forever Act was an excellent
compromise between farming and environmental concerns. If the state were
to lower the limit of phosphorous permitted to flow out of the
Everglades, the final cleanup costs would have escalated. And Flo-Sun
has already agreed to pay its fair share, they say.
As part of the agreement, Flo-Sun will pay up to $100 million over 20
years to help finance a 4,000-acre farm runoff retention pond, a fact
that Dominicus repeats seven times this morning. “Just because the
industry is here,” says Rosendahl, “we shouldn’t pay for everything.
Environmentalists should step back. They have no financial stake in
this, even though they are considered stakeholders.” Adds Dominicus:
“Never once has it been proven in a court of law that the industry
caused any damage to the adjacent Everglades. The issue with sugar is
phosphorous, and we believe the portion that Flo-Sun has agreed to pay
reflects the farmers’ contribution to the system.”
But many believe the sugar giant got off easy. Taxpayers sold public
land cheaply, financed its drainage, subsidized its land and water
taxes, provided cheap loans, and bought its price-controlled product.
Now they’re being asked to pay for most of the cleanup of Everglades’
wastewater.
Rosendahl pointed out that the Everglades Forever Act wants the
phosphorous level down to 50 parts per billion: “That’s two orders of
magnitude less than the effluent from a typical treatment plant in New
England.” Adds Dominicus, “Bottled water has more phosphorous.” But
Charles Lee of Florida Audubon asserts, “The Everglades, unlike many
other ecosystems, cannot survive with a phosphorous level over 10 parts
per billion.”
Flo-Sun’s cane fields are at the very edge of the Everglades, where
the shallower peat deposits are disappearing quickly. If anyone strikes
bedrock, surely it will be Flo-Sun. Then what will be the fate of the
lower Everglades? Subdivisions and malls? Racetracks and theme parks?
Ecologically speaking, the Everglades Agricultural Area will be beyond
repair.
Flo-Sun claims its line of organic sugar “protects Earth’s
resources.” However, as the Sierra Club points out, only a small portion
of the company’s operations, less than three percent, are organic. Also,
as Lee explains, “What is killing the Everglades is the phosphorous
runoff from oxidized, deteriorated soil, which isn’t solved by organic
techniques. The relationship of sugar companies to the Everglades is the
same as a tumor to a cancer patient.”
ACROSS POLITICAL LINES
Save Our Everglades (SOE) is a group headed by Mary Barley, widow of
George Barley, a wealthy and passionate environmentalist who died when
his small plane inexplicably went down on the way to an Everglades
conservation meeting. By her own admission Barley’s a “conservative
Republican.” In 1996 SOE placed three amendments on the Florida ballot.
Amendment 4 would have required farmers to pay a penny for each pound of
sugar produced in the Everglades Agricultural Area in order to fund an
Everglades cleanup; Amendment 5 made polluters responsible for cleaning
up their own mess; and Amendment 6 created an Everglades trust fund
primarily financed by the penny-a-pound tax.
Fighting back, sugar industry lawyers filed 38 lawsuits challenging
everything from misplaced commas to potentially unconstitutional
language in the amendments. They spent more than $35 million to defeat
Amendment 4, including newspaper, radio and television ads. Industry
analysts estimated that the sugar companies made about 5.2 cents profit
on every pound of sugar, a profit furthermore guaranteed by the federal
government. Barley claimed that the penny-a-pound tax would generate $30
million a year, $900 million over the program. Big Sugar said the tax
would cripple the industry and eliminate 40,000 jobs. It made an extra
effort to recruit black leaders around the job issue, some of whom spoke
at a company-organized rally.
On Election Day alone the sugar lobby spent more than $1 million
fighting the amendments. Amendment 4 lost in what a Fort Lauderdale Sun
Sentinel editorial called “a triumph of disinformation”; Amendments 5
and 6 won. Polluters would pay to clean up the Everglades, but without
the penny-a-pound tax, how was the money going to be raised?
In May 1999, the Miccosukee tribe, citing the Clean Water Act, won
federal approval for a 10-parts-per-billion phosphorous limit on their
75 thousand acres of reservation in the Everglades. Six months later
scientists at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection
advocated limiting the average phosphorous level for Water Conservation
Area 2 to eight-and-a-half parts per billion, noting that phosphorous
levels in unpolluted stretches of the Everglades were even lower. Thus
far, the managers running the cleanup do not have a clue how to meet the
new standards. Sugar representatives such as Dominicus are opting for
inertia. Déjà vu.
Flo-Sun shows inquiring reporters a public relations video that
describes how well the migrant Jamaican cane cutters are treated, how
their dingy gray barracks were repainted an upbeat white. “They’re
better than soldiers’ barracks,” claims Dominicus. The happy-cutters
video was made in response to Alec Wilkinson’s book Big Sugar, an exposé
of the industry’s notoriously poor labor record. In 1942 U.S. Sugar was
indicted for peonage in federal court, and until recently, migrant
workers were treated like indentured servants. Many of the cutters have
been since replaced by machines.
The largest of Flo-Sun’s three sugar mills is Okeelanta, which is so
noisy that visitors have to wear ear protectors and so steamy that
everything feels sticky, even the air. Rivers of mud-brown sucrose
squirt out as cane is shredded and pressed. Swirling tendrils of sweet
steam rise above caldrons of boiling liquid. Sixty feet overhead, a
conveyor transports sugar crystals to feed a mountain of sugar 600 yards
long. A continuous drizzle of crystals tinks against visitors’ yellow
plastic hard hats.
TED LEVIN
is the author of Liquid
Land: A Journey Through the Florida Everglades (University of Georgia
Press, to be published in September), from which this
story was adapted with permission. |
