The old TV hit “Miami Vice” mixed South Florida ambience with cocaine culture to enrapture American viewers back in the 80s. The new CBS series “Cane,” starring Jimmy Smits, recycles the same regional mood, with a decidedly Cuban-American flair. The result is a stereotypical brand of sultry Latin menace and melodrama.

The show’s producers have been careful to assure the real-world Fanjul family of Palm Beach County that any connection between them and the fictional Duque family is only coincidental. The absurd depiction of the Duques makes that claim entirely believable.

And oh yes: The commodity that fuels all the fun in the newly debuted series isn’t cocaine, but an equally devilish white powder – refined sugarcane.

Just kidding, of course. If table sugar were illegal, nearly 300 million Americans would be criminals for consuming enough of it to qualify as traffickers. Sixty pounds per person each year is shipped in the US.

But in Florida at least, it often seems that public enemy number one is “Big Sugar,” the big-sounding, usually pejorative nickname for South Florida’s sugar industry.
The caricature isn’t new. Remember fictional Congressman David Dilbeck, played by Burt Reynolds, from Carl Hiassen’s novel-turned-film “Strip Tease?” That tale of Dilbeck’s lust for the character portrayed by Demi Moore viewed doubly sweet for having a key scene of dastardly-do happen in a nighttime Okeechobee cane field.

Now with “Cane,” the klieg lights of national media are trained on the sugar industry as never before.
In Florida, this is nothing new. For years, in the minds of everybody from environmentalists to editorial writers to thirsty Miamians, fiction has been truer than truth. Big Sugar has become the Big Scapegoat for whatever ails the pop-up civilization known as South Florida.

It took millions of years for nature to form the Everglades. It’s taken people roughly a century to erect twin civilizations on the narrow strands between swamp and sea in South Florida, one on the Atlantic coast and another, smaller one on the Gulf of Mexico.

There goes the neighborhood: About half of the original Everglades is gone. Sixty years ago the rest first won federal protection. But the River of Grass and the ocean of people on its borders have become unavoidable and uneasy neighbors in this fragile eco-system mix of primal nature and populated cities.

As no one has yet suggested deporting new Miamians or Napolese as illegal immigrants, realistic solutions for South Florida’s overgrowth are in short supply. Let the blame game begin.

Rural Legends
Everybody’s heard of urban legends. Big Sugar is the butt of some rural ones. The main one is that the sugar industry is ruining Lake Okeechobee, and therefore much of South Florida’s civic water supply. But blaming sugar farms for the lake’s dirty problem is like blaming Florida’s morning commuters for making the air hard to breathe. Both the sugar fields and your SUV are guilty – just not primarily responsible.

Ninety-seven percent of the pollution and water in the Okeechobee receptacle originate not from agriculture plots south of the dike, but from points north of the lake, starting just south of Big Orlando. And the sugar industry met federally mandated phosphate-reduction levels 11 straight years until recent flooding. Farmers pay the tab of the cleanup.

But blaming Florida’s burgeoning populations scattered along the Kissimmee River Basin doesn’t pander to voters, sell newspapers, or create spicy lawsuit defendants like blaming industry does.

Then there’s the publicly circulated article of faith that Florida sugar-growers pocket tax money.

Type “sugar” and “subsidies” on your Internet Web search page. You’ll be scrolling all night through professional and amateur exposés that calculate to the dollar and cent the gift money the federal government gives to prop up what’s often believed to be an otherwise inefficient sugar industry.

The truth is almost comically the opposite. The American government is the only one out of the 142 sugar-producing countries around the world that does NOT financially support its sugar farmers by direct subsidies or other prop-ups. That’s the whole problem, and it’s why Congress puts a tariff on foreign sugar. If it didn’t, the domestic industry couldn’t survive. (That’s exactly what some want, of course. More to come on that.)

The “subsidy” amounts bandied about by Big Environment are formulated by taking the difference in the price of foreign, subsidized sugar and the price paid for it in the US once the tariff is tacked on. But the widespread and wrong assumption is that Washington writes checks to politically connected sugar farmers. In France, for example, the government subsidizes sugar farmers $.34 per pound before they even plant the crop. They grow more sugar there than France and even the rest of Europe can eat and drink. The rest? It’s dumped on the world market.

It’s widely known that American sugar-growers are synonymous with lobbying clout. Less known is that they wield most of their storied prowess to stave off government subsidies, not to win them. Industrial food companies – Big Dinner Table? – push for a sugar subsidy so they can pay less for sugar, then pocket the difference and charge consumers the same as always. With inflation factored in, Americans pay half today what they paid for sugar a generation ago.

So far Congress hasn’t budged in protecting American growers. For years, the US government sugar program has fended off artificially cheaper imports of sugar, just as it has for corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton and other big-ticket agricultural commodities. And the usual supermajority vote for the sugar program is in large measure bipartisan.

Sweet New World
But get this: Starting in January, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opens the American border to the omit sweet flow of foreign sugar. Mexico, very prominently. It’s the inauguration of a sweet new world for the American sugar industry.

And guess what? Florida’s sugar growers still will seek no government handout, nor does it shirk from the competition.

That’s because the industry down beneath Okeechobee operates with the kind of efficiency that dramatically belies the perception that American businesses can’t compete with cheap foreign labor and other costs. Florida sugar wholesales for $.25 a pound. Mexican sugar, $.34. And emergency supplies of sugar from Mexico after hurricane Katrina were found to contain additives – like rodent dung.

Truly free trade would be welcomed by the likes of US Sugar and Flo-Sun/Florida Crystals, the twin giants of the industry in Florida. Hurricanes, droughts, subsidized competition from overseas, the environmentalist lobby, and increasingly “green” judges have so put Big Sugar under siege that the industry has gotten lean and mean enough to compete in a worldwide laissez-faire market.

Beyond that, world trade rules negotiated through the World Trade Organization and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) rounds have South Florida sugar growers “voluntarily” limiting their own production so that 1.5 million tons of sugar a year – 15% of US production – can come in from foreign countries, duty-free.

It’s instructive that some of the same political voices that indignantly shout for tariffs against, say, cheap Chinese manufactured goods, cry foul when farm commodities enjoy trade protections against foreign crops that are cheaper only because their governments keep their prices artificially low to protect foreign jobs. And wouldn’t a shackled US sugar industry amount to “outsourcing” agricultural jobs?

The ultimate dream of the most radical environmentalists is to destroy South Florida’s sugar industry outright, claims Robert Coker, an executive and lobbyist for US Sugar. In its place they envision a vast reconstructed wetland untouched by man, he says. Only then could something like the original Everglades be truly revived. We’re talking about over a half-million acres of farmland – an area bigger than Palm Beach County.

“In public forums, environmentalists concede that sugar is the best alternative land-use,” Coker said. (Sugar cane depletes the organic muck south of Lake Okeechobee slower than other crops do.) “But then they turn around and lobby in Washington against the [federal] sugar program. They want to wreck the sugar industry so that the land can become cheap enough to be reclaimed by the government to reconstruct vast tracts of wetlands.”

The state of Florida could seize the sugar fields only by condemning the land and invoking eminent domain. The owners of the land would have to be compensated. That would be expensive almost beyond measure. The environmentalists’ only hope would seem to be drastically drive down the price of that land.

A usually unspoken but perhaps more realistic scenario to “evict” Big Sugar might be to force their farms off the lands to make way for Big Real Estate. It’s hard to imagine the Everglades regaining its original pristine state with the geometric plats of land in Palm Beach, Hendry and Lee counties studded with enough condominiums and row houses to connect Atlantic-Coast and Gulf-Coast Florida. But when the now-sliding Florida housing market rebounds and the state resumes its inevitable march past New York as America’s third-most-populous state, why wouldn’t the sugar companies start thinking, “To hell with it. Let’s sell.”? After all, real estate developers in Florida enjoy their own de facto subsidy. It’s called the homestead exemption.

The rural interior of central South Florida depends hugely on agriculture as its economic base. Wouldn’t the state be better off retaining it, rather than enjoying another rush of quick overdevelopment, and then wondering where the non-housing jobs will come from?

Going Green with Sugar
If the sugar barons are thinking that cynically, they’re not acting like it. Even as federal judges are starting to single out Sugar among a whole civilization of polluters in Central and South Florida; and even as trade barriers collapse at the Texas-Mexico border, Big Sugar has big plans to keep right on sweetening much of what you eat.

About the time this magazine went to press, the world’s largest sugar mill spilled out its first crystals in Clewiston, in Hendry County The aerial photo of the complex looks like a spy plane’s image of old Soviet missile installations – it’s that big, complex and self-sustaining.

The mill cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Its mission: To eliminate the need to ship harvested sugar to faraway refineries. Now it can be done in Florida. Take that, France and Mexico (and Hawaii and Texas and Louisiana, for that matter).

But Big Sugar’s biggest ambition for the future is about more than vertical business development and automation. What incredible irony if the presumptive polluter extraordinaire, the sugar industry, could step into a phone booth and emerge with a superhero’s “E” for “environment” on its chest; if sugar stalks and other agricultural refuse could replace Arabian oil in our cars’ fuel tanks, and maybe preclude the need for drilling derricks just over the horizon from Florida beaches.

Necessity is mothering invention on this, and not a moment too soon. Gov. Charlie Crist’s political decree has made environmentalism hip in (some) Republican circles practically overnight. Big Oil is the biggest political target on the planet, and Florida farmlands have a realistic shot at muscling into their profit margins by providing the technology to top off auto fuel tanks with biofuels. How’s replacing oil-industry jobs with Florida agribusiness ones for winning the hearts and minds of Floridians and their media sentinels?

A University of Florida project will team with Florida Crystals in the construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant that will produce 1-2 million gallons of ethanol a year, according to officials.

Right now corn-based ethanol is all the rage. The technology to produce and distribute significant quantities of it is already here, to a limit. But corn is a foodstuff staple for much of the world, including the poor world. Spiking prices already are making visible the problem with Big Environmentalism – it costs a lot, and those costs pinch impoverished nations disproportionately. Pricier tortillas in rural Mexico have recently made the natives restless, for example.

Sugar stalks and orange peels to the rescue? (Big Sugar grows both.) It’s probably going to happen, but not in market-altering quantity for some years to come. “Sucrose for ethanol has a better BTU equivalent [kinetic fuel potential] than corn, and uses less energy to produce,” said Bob Coker. “But the technology is not there yet. It will be.”

Brazil is proof that biomass can fuel an industrial economy. It’s hard to imagine that America will ever make that total commitment. More likely is a diversified fuel market that includes biofuels.

Don’t Change a Thing
Maybe what annoys the sugar industry’s enemies more than anything is its gargantuan political clout. No one in their right mind in Washington or Tallahassee will keep Sugar’s lobbyists waiting for long. And few run for major office in Florida without enjoying the sweet sounds of the industry’s coins rattling in their campaign coffers, or chafing at the sight of Sugar-bought TV ads painting a sour picture of sugar-free candidates on election eve.

US Sugar’s Bob Coker makes no apologies for his company’s political activism. “We’re very active in the Florida political marketplace, whether it’s on legislative policy, campaigns or activism on proposed constitutional amendments,” he said.

What’s seldom pointed out is that Sugar’s millions of dollars by and large are spent simply to maintain the status quo, and not to reinvent the economic wheel in Florida. Surrounded by political enemies and subsidized competition from abroad, Big Sugar’s political act looks something like Bruce Lee simultaneously fending off a circle of ninja assassins.

The bullying on behalf of radical change lies with the greenies who seek to restore South Florida to its 19th-century pastoral ways; or to single out South Florida farmers as the bad guys who spike the drinking water and kill wading birds.

To them, Florida’s sugar farms are a never-ending dull ache in the back of the neck. Somebody call Big Pharmacy.