Scapegoating an industry that is south of the lake may further the political agenda for some, but it doesn't help lower the water.

Sugar farmers in the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) understand that we farm in an environmentally sensitive area between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades, and we are dealing with issues that relate to our farming activities and their impact on the natural system.

However, it is not fair to make us the scapegoat for every environmental problem in South Florida. More importantly, scapegoating distracts attention from the need to support real corrective actions regarding Lake Okeechobee, water quality, flood control and water storage in this huge system that begins in Orlando.

Here are some facts:

Some 95 percent of the water flowing into Lake Okeechobee comes from the north. Heavy rainfall north of the lake, combined with the drainage required by extensive development in Central Florida, have produced this year's high water levels in Lake Okeechobee. Farmers don' t contribute to or benefit from these high levels. We support a return to lower lake levels as soon as possible.

Rather than expensive and ineffective stopgap measures, the most logical remedy is to proceed with the $8.4 billion Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP), which provides for major storage and cleaning of this water from the north. Scapegoating an industry that is south of the lake may further the political agenda for some, but it doesn't help lower the water.

Likewise, the recent heavy discharges down the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers are the result of the overall water management system of the 16 counties from Orlando south. The system is overworked, and it cannot be managed exclusively for any single area — not for Martin or St. Lucie County, not for the Everglades Agricultural Area, not for the smaller lakes
north of Lake Okeechobee, and not for the Gulf Coast. We are all in this together.

Quality of the water is also a region-wide issue. Water entering the lake from the northern tributaries can range as high as 700 parts per billion phosphorous. Farm water from the south accounts for only 5 percent of lake inflow and is one of the cleanest sources of lake water at 112 ppb phosphorus.

One major problem is the huge "mud zone" of sediment in the lake, starting at the entry point of the Kissimmee River and ranging southward to a point just west of the lock that sends water east to the St. Lucie River. Some blame sugar farmers for this as well, but in fact no one believes you can pump mud uphill. A project to clean water from this mud zone is high on the CERP list and farmers south of the lake support this effort.

Perhaps the oddest example of scapegoating came when some Treasure Coast residents wrongly blamed sugar farmers for the supposed delay in the Indian River Lagoon Project. In fact, there was no delay. The project could not have been authorized this year anyway because there was no Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) in Congress in 2003.

The IRL Project is the first CERP project to be reviewed for authorization, so the Army Corps of Engineers wants it to have the best possible chance to be authorized and to be successful. The Corps reported to the Everglades working group in Florida this month that it expects the Indian River Lagoon project to be included in the 2004 WRDA legislation next spring.

Let there be no mistaking our position. The sugar industry supports the entire CERP, including the Indian River Lagoon Project.

Going beyond scapegoating into fantasy, some of these same people claim that the problems of the St. Lucie River estuary and the Everglades can be solved by purchasing the EAA. That is ludicrous.

The idea of buying all, or a large part, of the Everglades Agricultural Area has been analyzed numerous times, including by the Corps as part of the CERP process. Buying the EAA and engineering it to store water would cost tens of billions of dollars, would take longer to accomplish and would provide fewer benefits than what the CERP projects will provide.

Further, the EAA is more than farmland. The area contains seven cities, communities populated by as many as 40,000 people, several major state and federal highways, power plants, vegetable packaging factories, farms, homes, churches, hospitals, schools, prisons and other urban features. The land valuation alone would approach $50 billion. This is not a solution to solving the problems we face in Everglades restoration.

There is only one real solution for the St. Lucie River estuary system on the horizon, and that is the $8.4 billion CERP projects and the ongoing state, federal and private efforts to improve water flow and quality. Let us work together to resolve system-wide problems on a system-wide basis, as the state and federal governments now are doing. Scapegoating by extremists with political agendas doesn't help. Constructive support for these cooperative efforts is the answer.