Burning sugar cane pollutes Florida's communities of color. Brazil shows there's another way

[Judi Lynn]

Florida’s largest sugar companies say cane burns are safe and can’t be stopped without economic harm. But Brazil has successfully transitioned away from the controversial practice, and experts there say the U.S. can follow their lead.

By Nadia Sussman and Propublica on Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 1:07 pm

This year, reporters at The Palm Beach Post and ProPublica investigated the impact of sugar cane burning in Florida. The harvesting practice helps produce more than half of America’s cane sugar, but it sends smoke and ash into largely low-income communities of color in the state’s heartland.

In our reporting, we learned that other countries have found ways to harvest their crops without those burns. So we recently traveled to Brazil, the world’s largest producer of sugar cane, to learn how and why they switched to another method.

Brazil has a massive sugar cane industry that produces raw sugar, ethanol and electricity. The country farms more than 20 million acres, compared to less than 1 million in the U.S.

Beginning in the 1990s, residents of São Paulo, the nation’s largest sugar-cane-producing state, voiced concerns similar to those of Glades residents today: They complained of ash and soot blanketing their homes, and of respiratory problems.

More:
https://www.cltampa.com/news/burning-sugar-cane-pollutes-floridas-communities-of-color-brazil-shows-theres-another-way-12646434

~ ~ ~

Really makes you wonder why the predatory Florida sugar barons hadn't made any moves to clean up their acts long ago, doesn't it? It took years of suffering and struggle and a class action lawsuit to get any satisfaction at all years ago:

FEBRUARY 2011
IN THE KINGDOM OF BIG SUGAR
BY MARIE BRENNER

After their father lost one of Cuba’s great sugar fortunes to Castro’s revolution, Alfy and Pepe Fanjul built a new empire in Florida, importing cheap Jamaican labor to do the brutal, dangerous work of sugarcane harvesting, and wielding ever more political power in Tallahassee and Washington, D.C. In 1989, outraged by what he calls “modern-day slavery,” a crusading 37-year-old lawyer named Edward Tuddenham took them to court, spawning four ongoing class-action suits on behalf of 20,000 former workers. Marie Brenner investigates an epic legal war that pits the Fanjuls’ American Dream against the nightmare of migrant laborers.

. . .

April 1999. From the 11th floor of the West Palm Beach courthouse, you can see the Breakers hotel on the island town of Palm Beach, the red tiles on the roof of the museum that used to be the robber baron Henry Flagler’s mansion, the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, and the marina full of bobbing yachts, among them the 95-foot Crili, which belongs to Alfonso “Alfy” Fanjul, the head of Florida Crystals, whose subsidiaries, Atlantic, Osceola, and Okeelanta, are corporate defendants in Bygrave. For Tuddenham, the psychic difference between the Texas border and West Palm Beach is nonexistent. He believes that both are nether places of political-influence peddling, where Anglo and immigrant cultures collide. From Palm Beach, he can drive 90 minutes and be in the Third World, in the sugarcane-growing town of Belle Glade, with its squalor and its historical lack of regard for the rights Americans take for granted. The Palm Beach sheriff’s deputies once used police dogs to break up protesting workers on a Fanjul property.

Bernard Bygrave, a class representative of Tuddenham’s case, is one of thousands of Caribbean islanders, mostly Jamaicans, who once worked at Okeelanta for Alfy Fanjul and his brother Jose, known as Pepe. As a result of more than a dozen cases filed by Tuddenham and his colleagues, the cane cutters are no longer Fanjul employees, but they are charging in connected class-action suits that the Fanjuls’ companies engaged in cheating them of their rightful wages in a contract which they argue is “a monumental bait and switch.” In May 1992, at the headiest moment in the litigation hell the case has turned into, a Florida judge awarded the workers $51 million in a summary judgment. That moment was fleeting, however, for three years later the decision was reversed on appeal and subsequently broken down into five separate jury trials. Now there are 90 crates of documents in the West Palm Beach courthouse. If nothing else, they provide an encyclopedia of a 50-year American labor scandal. Tuddenham calls the system “modern-day slavery.” The Fanjuls’ lawyers see the case as “a major loss of income to thousands of decent hardworking men.”

Like Henry Flagler, who brought the railroad to Florida and built the town of West Palm Beach for his laborers, the Fanjuls, after fleeing Castro’s Cuba, bought out scores of cattle and vegetable and sugar farmers in the Everglades and created nearly 180,000 acres of sugarcane fields, harvested by Jamaicans they imported under the government’s H-2 program. Cane was harvested by foreign workers because it was such brutal and dangerous work that no Americans would take it. Hour after hour the men chopped cane with machetes and stacked it in the fields. They wore metal arm and shin guards, and had to stoop over agonizingly to chop through stalks as thick as bamboo. Many were allowed only a 15-minute lunch break, to wolf rice down while standing up. Win or lose, the Bygrave cases have a powerful subtext: they are a morality play about the employment of foreign workers with marginal legal rights.

More:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2001/02/floridas-fanjuls-200102

~ ~ ~

The Florida sugar barons are features in this Mother Jones article:

The High Human Cost of America’s Sugar Habit

Low pay, chemical exposure, and a life of debt.

BY SANDY TOLAN WITH EUCLIDES CORDERO NUEL; PHOTOS BY PEDRO FARIAS-NARDI
SEPTEMBER 17, 2021

- snip -

Over the last two years, Euclides and I mounted a broad search. We traveled to the market where Lulu had been snatched away from his family. We’d visited his Haitian hometown, stopping in at United Nations offices, city hall, the birth registry, and radio stations that agreed to broadcast live appeals. We zigzagged between the two countries on a road so broken that in long stretches it would have been faster to walk. And we made repeated trips to the old state-run bateyes, many now sold off and privatized, that had held Haitians like Lulu against their will. We never abandoned our mission, but we came to realize the story wasn’t just about Lulu. It was about the 68,000-some Haitian cañeros still in the fields, and their living and working conditions, especially under the island’s biggest plantation holder: Central Romana. Owned in part by brothers Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, Cuban exiles who are now billionaire Florida sugar barons, Central Romana sugarcane is cut by Haitians, crushed and poured as raw sugar into the holds of vessels, and shipped to the Fanjuls’ ASR Domino refinery in Baltimore harbor. Then it’s packaged into 4-pound Domino bags, sent in bulk to industrial bakeries, and shipped by rail to be made into Hershey bars and other chocolates, cookies, and Halloween candies.

. . .



Alfonso Fanjul, Judith Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani, and Raysa Fanjul at a charity ball in 2017. Nick Mele/Patrick McMullan/Getty

The Fanjuls are famous for giving across the aisle, a habit that has helped protect their government payouts no matter which party holds the upper hand. Alfy aligns with the Democrats; Pepe with the GOP. Trump’s billionaire Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and his wife have been guests at the Fanjuls’ Casa de Campo mansion. “The Fanjuls are the most delightful hosts,” Hilary Geary Ross said of Pepe and Emilia Fanjul in the society column she wrote for a Palm Beach magazine. The top recipient of Fanjul largesse serving today—with more than $280,000 across his Senate career—is Florida’s Marco Rubio, a key supporter of the price-support program. In his memoir, An American Son, Rubio describes his close relationship with the Fanjuls, including a dinner hosted on their boat, and a “Labor Day weekend in the Hamptons, where many of their friends and major Republican donors would spend the holiday.”

Alfy Fanjul moves among powerful Democrats, historically, none more than the Clintons, who have spent time at Casa de Campo, where Bill golfed. Perhaps the most famous example of the Fanjuls’ access to power was captured in the Starr report: Alfy Fanjul, upset over Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign pledge to tax sugar producers a penny per pound to preserve the Everglades, reached Bill Clinton by phone in the Oval Office as he made a failed attempt to end his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. In a written statement, a Labor Department spokesperson insisted that the Fanjuls’ political power has not shaped its actions: “DOL has not modified its position on the Dominican Republic as a result of any public or private actors attempting to influence it.”

More:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/sugar-central-romana-fanjul-dominican-republic/

~ ~ ~



Leon Black & Epstein were friends with billionaire Pepe Fanjul.

Pepe & his brother Alfonso are lifelong #CIA assets who helped the CIA in their effort to overthrow Castro in Cuba in the 50s.

Link to tweet

Fanjul family now run a vast sugar empire out of West Palm Beach & Dominican Republic.





~ ~ ~

A sweet deal: The royal family of cane benefits from political giving
by Amy Bracken @brackenamy July 23, 2015 5:00AM ET

The sugar barons of America, the Fanjul brothers, have a cozy relationship with the US government



Andrés Michel, 75, lost an eye cultivating cane meant for the sugar company Central Romana. He still works the fields.

WASHINGTON — Charlotte Ponticelli used to work for the State Department, but when she describes a recent visit to sugarcane plantations in the Dominican Republic, she ditches the diplomat speak.

“What I saw made me sick,” she says of the laborers’ living conditions. “[The cane workers] were skeletons wearing rags. One old man told us, ‘We have no access to anything from our pensions.’ They had worked for 40 to 50 years, and nothing … I wanted to cry all the way home. I thought, ‘After … all this work, this is how these people live?’”

By “all this work,” Ponticelli means the United States Department of Labor’s push to improve conditions for cane workers in the DR, one of the top sugar exporters to the U.S. As part of the Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA-DR, which went into effect in the Caribbean nation in 2007, signatory countries were required to enforce their own labor laws. The deal was promoted as a tool to improve worker conditions — just as the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is being advertised now — but such promises are frequently broken. Four years into CAFTA-DR, an activist priest filed a complaint under the treaty about an alleged “laundry list” of abuses on Dominican sugar plantations, from work-hour and wage violations to unhygienic living conditions. Ponticelli, who previously headed the DOL’s Bureau of International Labor Affairs, facilitated meetings between Rev. Christopher Hartley and her old staff in Washington.

In 2013, after a two-year investigation, the department issued a report expressing concern that the Dominican government might be failing to protect sugar workers. The report was followed by three reviews, one every six months, that found working conditions still lacking. But as the DOL pushed for reform in Dominican sugar, members of Congress and other politicians maintained lucrative relationships with the royal family of cane: the Fanjuls.

More:
http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/fanjul-family-benefits-political-donations.html