Douglas would trade medal for preserved Glades

December 2, 1993

A bone-numbing north wind blew across the breadth of Everglades early this week. At the farthest tip, near Cape Sable, the sky flashed with wild birds: herons, curlews, ibises, blue egrets, white pelicans, sandpipers and a few roseate spoonbills.

They swarmed to the mud banks and oyster beds as the tide ran out, diving, wading, and wheeling overhead in such numbers that one could hardly imagine the place is dying. It is.

A long way off, an amazing woman named Marjory Stoneman Douglas was sleeping at the White House as an honored guest of the first family. On Tuesday she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for a life's work trying to preserve the Everglades.

Medallions are nice, but Mrs. Douglas probably would trade hers in an instant for one solid promise from Mr. Clinton. Water is what the Everglades needs—a restored flow, streaming pure from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay.The way it was 103 years ago, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born.

That any of her Everglades remains untouched is the miracle. What Mrs. Douglas and her colleagues accomplished will never be done again. Not a chance.

Look at a map. The entire southwest thumb of Florida is a park—2,300 square miles that can't be malled, dredged, subdivided or plowed into golf courses. President Harry Truman made it official in 1947, the same year that Mrs. Douglas came out with her masterpiece, River of Gross.

Originally the park was 460,000 acres, a small piece of the total Everglades.The remainder was to be channelized by the Army Corps with the unabashed mission of conquest. In 1950 the park doubled its size, and has since grown to 1.5 million acres.

Saving so much raw real estate from the clutches of banks, developers, and speculators would be impossible today. Even if such a vast spread existed, the forces of greed would never surrender it for preservation.

The creation of Everglades National Park culminated a crusade that began in 1927, when Mrs. Douglas was just one voice on a local committee pushing for it. She admits that she knew "next to nothing" about the Everglades. When she started researching her book, she'd visited the place only a few times.

Today she is its patron saint. Ironically, her highest honor comes when her beloved Everglades is most imperiled. Although it can't be paved, it is being starved. Man-made canals with man-made faucets govern the ebb of its lifeblood; decisions rest with bureaucrats sympathetic to special interests.

The headwaters of Mrs. Douglas' river are spoiled by the sewage of millionaire sugar barons. What moves south is siphoned to suburbs, cities and a handful of vegetable farmers. The water that reaches Florida Bay is an anemic trickle—a 10th of what it once was. The bay, muddy and algae-clogged, languishes.

Those grand birds that rise from the mangroves on a wintry breeze are but a fleeting fraction of what once thrived here. Yet it would be untrue to say that the sight isn't a cause for hope. Given half a chance, nature rebounds swiftly.

Soon the Clinton administration will reveal more details of its controversial Everglades restoration plan, which includes a cleanup settlement with Big Sugar. At stake is more than bird life. It's our water, our economy, our whole future.

For political impact, the Everglades deal will be promoted as tough, bold and urgent. It had better be exactly that, or Mr. Clinton will have to contend again with Mrs. Douglas.

She might not be the type to return a presidential medallion, but she could definitely hang him with it.

Sugar bosses fight to keep real sweet deal

April 30, 1995

Powerful politicians want to spoil Big Sugar's sweetheart deal by eliminating the program that artificially props up the price.

Sugar barons hate the word "welfare," but that's what it is: guaranteed income, at the expense of foreign growers and American consumers.

Last week a congressional subcommittee meeting in Belle Glade heard from scores of regular folks who said that wiping out federal price guarantees would wipe out their way of life.

The sugar companies say so, too: They just can't hack it in a free-market economy.

Judging from all that whining, you'd think they were barely scraping by—U.S. Sugar, Flo-Sun and the other growers. You'd think their saga was one of a small farmer, struggling to eke a living from the fickle soil.

That's the image being peddled these days, as Big Sugar lobbies to keep its place on the federal gravy train.

And it's impossible not to feel sympathy for the working people of Clewiston, Pahokee and Belle Glade, who rely on the industry's prosperity. Those folks are truly scared, and they made an impression on the visiting congressmen.

Big Sugar's other face was not so visible. Take the Fanjul family, for instance, which owns 170,000 acres of Okeechobee cane. Its tale is not such a humble tearjerker.

As heads of Flo-Sun, brothers Alfie and Pepe Fanjul have gotten grossly wealthy because the U.S. government lets them charge eight cents per pound above the world price for sugar, and imposes strict import quotas on foreign competitors.

Forbes magazine estimates the program enriches the Fanjuls by $65 million a year. Their combined fortune is said to exceed $500 million. They live luxuriantly in Palm Beach, and contribute heavily (and, up to now, productively) to both Democrats and Republicans.

Interestingly, the Cuban-born brothers have never applied for American citizenship. They keep Spanish passports, which means their foreign assets aren't subject to U.S. estate taxes.

Oh, it gets better.

Recently the Fanjuls discovered the benefits of minority set-aside programs. They own most of a financial company, FAIC Securities, that's getting a cut of the juicy municipal bond business from Dade and Broward.

Set-asides were conceived to help local minority-owned firms compete with underwriting giants such as Merrill Lynch. Broward finance director Phillip Allen told Forbes it was "irrelevant" that the Fanjuls were non-citizen multimillionaires.

It's naive to think that the anti-sugar sentiment in Congress was born of righteous indignation. The impetus for "reform" comes mainly from candy makers, soft drink companies and other commercial users of sugar.

Big Sugar's supporters contend that eliminating price supports won't help consumers, and they're right. Coca-Cola isn't famous for passing its savings along to shoppers.

The best argument for axing the price supports is fairness. If Congress is slashing welfare, the blade ought to come down as brutally on corporate moochers as on social programs.

The sugar barons always howl about doom and disaster. They cried the same way when they were told to clean up the water they dump in the Everglades.

The truth is, they won't go out of business unless they choose to. A glimpse of the Fanjuls' lifestyle is glittering proof that Big Sugar isn't a struggling, shoestring operation.

Killing the price guarantees undoubtedly would have a major impact, and probably lead to a radical paring of expenses. For starters, the sugar barons could save millions by cutting back on lawyers, lobbyists, yachts, polo ponies.

Whoa. Now we're really talking disaster.