Sugar Subsidies Blamed for Pollution in Florida Everglades

The National Audubon Society and Florida Keys businesses contend that South Florida sugar growers are the prime polluters of the Everglades and have urged Congress to end sugar price supports and begin saving the delicate ecosystem.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get rid of this terrible subsidy,” said Edwin Moure, who leads Audubon’s effort to restore the Everglades.

The sugar industry said it is doing its share to clean up the Everglades. Approved by U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, Florida adopted the Everglades Forever Act last year under which sugar growers have to pay $322 million over 20 years to remove agricultural nutrients from the so-called “river of grass.”

Growers argue that the price supports ensure consumers a stable food supply, provide jobs and help counter subsidies that foreign governments provide their growers.

Environmentalists, however, contend that price supports constitute government-sponsored pollution of the Everglades, a freshwater swamp stretching 100 miles from Lake Okeechobee in central Florida to the Florida Bay at the southern tip of mainland Florida.

Some 700,000 acres designated as the Everglades Agricultural Area have been drained and converted to farmland. The primary crop is sugar cane; the region produces more than half the nation’s sugar supply.

But phosphorous-laden farm runoff mingles with the freshwater reaching the Everglades, killing marine life and upsetting the ecological balance. Additionally, growers divert two-thirds of the Everglades’ water into the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean so their fields don’t get flooded, and the reduction of freshwater reaching the Florida Bay is to blame for widespread algae blooms, Moure said.