Gainesville.com

Mary Barley: Big Sugar and the Everglades

April 8, 2011

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20110408/NEWS/110409559?p=2&tc=pg

Frank C. Ortis ("Attack on sugar leaves a sour taste") applauded the sugar program in your online edition on April 4. I wonder if he knows the truth about this program.

I have spent much of my life working to save the Everglades. Phosphorus from the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) as well as sugar demanding water be wasted to sea continues to be the biggest impediments to a healthy Everglades. Well over half of the EAA’s 700,000 acres is owned by Big Sugar. The sugar program has made Big Sugar very rich. Big Sugar can buy the favors of politicians with ease, and it does just that.

Ortis says that the sugar program “doesn’t cost anything.” How wrong can one be?

While our state is in court over pollution of the Everglades, Big Sugar stays put in the EAA, raking in profits and forcing the Army Corps of Engineers along with other state and federal agencies to try to save the Everglades by working around their massive operations and forcing Florida and American taxpayers to foot the bill to clean up its pollution. To date, this is in the billions of dollars and growing more expensive every day. This is the taxpayers bill.

Now, for the consumer costs. Instead of openly writing checks to sugar producers, our government limits domestic production and foreign imports of sugar to keep the price far higher than the world price, a crafty way to hide this massive subsidy to the sugar industry. The sugar program is a price fixing gimmick that saddles U.S. consumers with the bill. It operates as a guaranteed profit right out of the consumers’ pocketbook. In 1998, the U.S. General Accounting Office estimated that consumers and manufactures paid an extra $1.9 billion a year in excess food costs due to the sugar program. Today, it is estimated to be an extra cost in the $4 billion a year range.

Ortis claims that changing the sugar program, as Senator Lugar and others propose, would rob Florida of more than 20,000 jobs, which is questionable given there are no more than 120 sugar cane farms in the state. The fact is that an estimated 112,000 jobs were lost in the U.S. sugar-using industries between 1997 and 2009, as candy makers and bakers closed their U.S. operations entirely due in large part to the outrageous cost of sugar.

The time has come to stop this robbery of the consumer and the taxpayer and this assault on America’s Everglades. Congress should enact real reform and kill the sugar program.

Mary Barley

Founder

Everglades Trust

Islamorada