SUGAR FARMERS NOT AT FAULT

Publication: Key West Citizen
Printed: Thursday, May 31, 2001
Written By: Malcolm S. Wade, Jr.

Malcolm Wade is Senior Vice President of the United States Sugar Corporation.  This featured letter to the editor was written in response to the Byron Stout article, "Environmentalism's Quickly Becoming a Four-Letter Word," printed on January 17, 2001 in the Fort Myers News-Press.

Citing the need for regional government in the Florida Keys, a reader somehow links his regional problems to sugar farmers100 miles to the north. Claims that sugar farmers are somehow responsible for water problems in the Keys and Florida Bay are simply not true.

The consensus among the scientific community has long been that water from the Everglades Agricultural Area plays no role in Florida Bay’s problems. Dr. Ron Jones of Florida International University, who gave expert witness testimony on the issue to the U.S. Justice Department in 1993, sated, "There is no evidence that anthropogenic nutrients, especially phosphorus, are entering Florida Bay from the agricultural and municipal areas to the North.

Dic Pettigrew, in 1995 as chairman of the Governor’s Commission For a Sustainable South Florida, said of the EAA farms, "There’s a lot of false information out in the public. We need to put it to rest. That’s not the problem impacting Florida Bay."

Farmers have dramatically reduced phosphorus levels using new on-farm water management practices and we have helped fund a series of filter marshes constructed by the Water Management District that further clean storm water before it moves into the Everglades system.

Phosphorus levels in water leaving our farms have averaged about 100 parts per billion, which is significantly lower than runoff from South Florida urban areas, including the Florida Keys. Currently, EAA farmers are the only group to be assessed taxes to clean up their runoff. Sugar farmers are paying 100 percent of the cost to clean the water leaving the farms.

In August, the District announced that phosphorus leaving sugar farms had been reduced by 55 percent—the fifth straight year that the farmers and exceeded the 25 percent reductions required by the 1994 Everglades Forever Act.

While the scientific community as a whole has embraced these findings, farmers continue to have to respond to misinformation from those who seem to be more interested in demonizing agriculture than in solving real problems.