The sugar industry (or any other industry) probably shouldn't be there in the first place. Our water supply depends on the health of the ecosystem. As less fresh water flows through the Everglades, salt water encroaches into our aquifers. Full story here.
IN June, Gov. Charlie Crist announced that Florida would buy one of the state’s two big sugar enterprises, the United States Sugar Corporation. He billed the purchase as a “jump-start” in the environmental restoration of the Everglades, which cane growers are accused of polluting with fertilizer runoff.
But in the end, the $1.7 billion buyout, scheduled to be completed in early 2009, may also prove to be a financial boon to the state’s remaining sugar superpower, Florida Crystals.
One of the country’s wealthiest families, the Fanjuls of Palm Beach, controls Florida Crystals and today touches virtually every aspect of the sugar trade in the United States. . . .
Others, like makers of candy and cereal, say the Fanjuls already control too much of the sugar trade. They want to buy sugar cheap and say the Fanjuls have long charmed Congress into legislating price supports that keep it expensive.
Free-trade advocates also complain, saying that a private business has used the shelter of the federal sugar program, created in the Depression to nurture struggling farmers, to increase its corporate hammerlock.
“These people have been absolutely extorting consumers for decades, and the only reason they’re existing in the first place is, they were able to get sweet deals [no pun intended, I'm sure] from governments that were propping them up,” says Sallie James, a trade policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, referring to Florida Crystals and U.S. Sugar. . . .
Fidel Castro chased the Fanjuls from Cuba in 1959, ending five generations of the family’s controversial rule in the sugar industry there. Starting with cash moved out of Cuba and worn-out milling equipment bought second-hand in Louisiana, the Fanjuls spent recent decades buying refineries and related businesses — an enterprise that ultimately stretched seamlessly from the canefields of Florida to America’s kitchen cupboards and beyond. . . .
Given the political dynamics, some industry analysts say the U.S. Sugar buyout is something other than an Everglades rescue.
“My instincts are to suggest that it’s a bailout,” says Ms. James of the Cato Institute. “Sugar prices have been going down. You’ve been signing trade agreements bringing in more foreign sugar. Basically, the company’s going down because of government policy, so they’re saying, ‘You should bail us out.’ ” . . .
GOVERNMENT intervention in the complicated and notoriously difficult sugar trade is hardly novel. To insulate domestic producers from the booms and busts of global commodity prices, Washington established a system of price, planting and import controls in the 1930s. . . .
[T]he sugar program has continued to work the old way, with Washington propping up the domestic price by limiting the supply of raw sugar on the market, through an elaborate system of loan procedures and import quotas. Today, domestic sugar costs about 18 cents a pound; elsewhere in the world, the price bounces around 6 to 12 cents a pound. American consumers may not know it, but they’re paying for that difference. . . .
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