The sugar cane monoculture in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee is the biggest obstacle to Everglades restoration, Cris Costello told Ancient Islands Sierra Club Thursday.
Costello, the lead organizer of Sierra’s Our Wild Florida campaign targets Everglades restoration and pollution issues ranging from red tide to regular burning of sugar cane fields.
Some of the main points from her talk included:
The sugar industry is very powerful politically, supporting candidates of both political parties for decades.
The industry’s political clout has allowed it to defend a federal program that inflates the price of U.S. grown sugar at the expense of $3.5 billion a year to the public.
The environmental and health impacts of the longtime practice of burning the sugar fields to cut production and transportation costs for the industry falls exclusively on the residents and workers in the areas around the sugar plantations. State forestry officials prohibit burning the fields when the winds would carry the smoke to wealthy communities to the east, such as Wellington, Mar A Lago and Palm Beach.
The Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee is a key chokepoint in efforts to send more, cleaner water toward Everglades National Park.
The current reservoir plans are inadequate because they are too small and serve more as irrigation reservoirs for the sugar corporations as treatment marshes.