Big Sugar wants Florida lawmakers to make its critics shut up • Florida Phoenix

Signs at our state line now welcome visitors to “the Free State of Florida,” but some members of our fine Legislature are working reeeeeally hard to make those signs a lie.

They want to take away our sweet freedom to talk smack about Big Sugar.

Legislators are almost always eager to please the sugar industry. This Florida business behemoth employs tons of lobbyists and hands out campaign contributions more generously than a float full of Gasparilla pirates tossing beads to the crowd.

But despite having that heavy force shoving them forward, this week someone dumped a little sugar into the Senate bill’s gas tank.

If these bills SB 290 and HB 433, pass, it would put a major crimp in conversations about who’s to blame for fouling Florida and fooling its taxpayers.

“This would give one of the wealthiest and most powerful polluters operating in Florida a weapon to wield against its critics,” warned Eve Samples, executive director of the environmental group Friends of the Everglades.

But that’s the whole point — to shut down the constant criticism that the whole industry faces. They’re so sensitive!

If the bills pass, then the conversation changes.

Sugar growers have long been a major source of pollution for the Everglades and Lake Okeechobee? Nope, sorry, can’t say that anymore.

The sugar industry’s practice of burning its cane stalks after harvest sends billows of choking smoke into poor communities that damages everyone’s health? Nope, can’t say that either.

Their generous federal price supports are a bad deal for taxpayers? Uh-uh, that’s totally off limits too.

One of the major sugar producers has a hand in a controversial new AI data center in Palm Beach County. They probably want to stop you from criticizing that, too.

They’re desperate to make everyone shut their pieholes — and the way they want to do it is actually clever. But sweet, it ain’t.

Lemon lawmakers

To explain what these bills would change, we first need to talk about a legal concept known as “veggie libel.” Despite what it sounds like, this does NOT involve people saying mean things about Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber from “Veggie Tales.”

Florida is one of 13 states with a so-called “veggie libel law.” Such a law allows producers of perishable foods such as strawberries or blueberries to sue for damages if their products are willfully or maliciously disparaged with false information. You will not be at all surprised to hear that the language in the law was written by farm industry lobbyists.

When the Legislature passed this ludicrous law in 1994, the Tampa Bay Times noted that “farmers could sue for damages if a consumer makes a derisive statement about Florida produce that isn’t based on ‘reliable scientific data.’”

The paper observed, “Since the Florida Legislature contains its share of lemons, we wonder if the proposed law would also protect the reputation of our lawmakers.”

The lemons — er, excuse me, the lawmakers — are now looking to streeeeettttcccch the veggie libel law to include the sugar industry. How? By the simple deletion of the word “perishable” from the existing law, “along with any language involving perishable foods,” the Tallahassee Democrat reported last week.

That way, the veggie libel law covers sugar and the people who grow it.

But wait, as Billy Mays used to say on the infomercials — there’s MORE!

“It also adds agricultural practices used in producing food products to the existing disparagement law,” the story reported. “This broadens the law, so critics of big concerns like Florida sugar producers may fear speaking out and getting sued.”

The Democrat quoted a legal expert saying that if these bills pass, Florida would have “the broadest law in the country in terms of food disparagement regulation.”

Remember, the sugar industry doesn’t have to win the lawsuits. They just have to have a law that gives them ground to sue.

The expense of defending against any legal onslaught — or against multiple ones — will drain anyone’s pocketbook, especially since the bills allow the winner of the suit to make the loser pay its legal fees.

Who asked for this? Take a wild guess.

But what was surprising is who showed up to oppose it.

Howitzers

The House version of the bill is sponsored by Rep. Danny Alvarez, R-Hillsborough County, who surprisingly does NOT appear to be stooped over from carrying so much water for sugar. The same goes for the sponsor of the other bill, Sen. Keith Truenow, R-Tavares.

At the first committee stop for his bill, though, Truenow managed to avoid ever mentioning Big Sugar. It probably helped that it’s a committee he chairs, the Senate Agriculture Committee.

His bill — which is titled “the Florida Farm Bill,” rather than the more honest “the Ginormous Agribusiness Shuts Up Its Critics Bill” — contains a lot of other non-sugar provisions, but Truenow skipped over them too. It was almost like he was trying to slide it by everyone without them noticing it.

“Truenow did not explain the Florida Farm Bill when he presented it for its first public hearing in Tallahassee in December,” the TCPalm newspaper reported this week. “When a reporter questioned him about it after the hearing, Truenow said his goal is to ensure that sugar growers can use Florida’s food libel law.

“‘There are some things that we produce in the state of Florida that aren’t perishable,” Truenow [said]. ‘We want to include them, like sugar or some other products.’” Note that he was unable to name any other product that would benefit.

Once people did find out what was happening, a lot of them raised objections. The environmental groups that were the prime target of the clampdown, of course. But so did another group that I don’t think the sponsors expected: people from the Make America Healthy Again movement.

In case you just sat up in bed after nine years in a coma, the MAHA movement is the health-related arm of the MAGA movement. Its greatest achievement so far has been to get non-doctor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. named secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

The MAHA folks are highly suspicious of food additives, and Kennedy announced last year that “sugar is poison.” So, it should come as no surprise that these folks looked at the House and Senate bills the same way they would look at howitzers pointed their way and primed to fire.

At one House committee hearing on the Alvarez bill, lots of MAHA and associated right-wing group leaders in the state spoke up against the bill. Some of their comments in favor of free speech were downright eloquent.

One, Kathleen Murray, Florida education director for Citizens Defending Freedom, told the committee, “Florida can champion agriculture without burying dissent or chilling First Amendment rights.”

A chorus of boos

One of the staunchest of the MAHA multitude is Florida Republican Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna. She recently joined the chorus booing these bills.

“What’s going on with the Florida state legislature, passing or trying to pass legislation protecting big ag,” Luna wrote on X last week. “Big ag should be open to public criticism, especially if they’re trying to make people sick.”

“This isn’t what’s happening,” objected Brandon Leslie, CEO of the Ron DeSantis-friendly publication “Florida’s Voice.” “Don’t fall for the leftwing environmentalist talking points[.] They’re manipulating MAHA.”

Of course, nobody listened to him. They did their own research, as is their wont.

MAHA moms began bombarding legislators with emails and phone calls objecting to the bills. When Truenow’s language came up for a vote in the Senate Rules Committee Tuesday, the hearing room in Tallahassee was packed with MAHA folks as well as environmental activists. I hear the sugar lobbyists were skulking around in the back, avoiding everyone’s eyes.

Truenow tried to maneuver around the warnings about the free-speech implications of the bill but failed.

Instead, a member of the committee, Sen. Jonathan Martin, R-Fort Myers, tersely proposed an amendment striking the entire section of the bill granting sugar the same legal standing as people growing perishable food. Truenow didn’t put up much of a fight. Martin’s amendment passed unanimously.

“That was a surprise,” said Chris Wittman, co-founder of the environmental group Captains for Clean Water.

But there’s still the House version to deal with, and it still contains the Big Sugar Smackdown — and something else that’s stinky.

Simpson’s secret

The original author of both versions of the Florida Farm Bill is none other than former Senate President-turned-Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson. Wittman joked that Simpson is so tight with the state’s sugar barons, “he doesn’t have an office at the sugar companies, but he definitely works there.”

He’s determined to see his bill turned into law, too.

When Truenow’s bill was briefly held up from having a hearing in the Senate Rules Committee, Simpson threw an epic hissy fit. He even took a swipe at the Rules Committee chair, Sen. Kathleen Passidomo, R-Naples, implying she was some kind of unpatriotic American who didn’t like agriculture.

Turns out there’s more than one part of Simpson’s bill that’s objectionable and it may be the real reason he’s so intent on getting it passed.

I found this out by talking to Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida. She made the same points at the Senate Rules Committee meeting. However, her comments there were all but drowned out by the hoopla over the squelching of free speech.

Hidden deep in the bills, as noted this week by the Tampa Bay Times, is a section that orders Florida state agencies to determine whether any state-owned land purchased for conservation since January 2024 is “suitable” for sale to agriculture.

If it is, then that land would be declared surplus property and offered for sale to farmers or ranchers. The money from any sales wouldn’t go to the agency that owned the property. Instead, it would go to Simpson’s agency.

This is not the way Florida is supposed to declare state-owned land to be surplus, something that happens only rarely.

The existing process involves a lengthy review by a special land-preservation committee and then a vote by the governor and Cabinet. These Simpson-written bills, if they pass, would skip over all that.

This is a horn that Simpson has been honking for the past three years. He has said quite plainly that he thinks the state has preserved too much land.

“Let’s say over the next five years we buy a billion dollars’ worth of property,” he said at one conference. “You could probably surplus $300 or $400 million of that.”

In testifying before the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2023, Simpson called for declaring surplus some of the acreage the state had bought recently for the popular Florida Wildlife Corridor. Why should we sell off property we just bought? He offered one simple (in both senses of the word) reason.

“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the state to own all these lands,” he told the senators.

What he’s envisioned happening marks “a huge shift in state policy,” Wraithmell told me. She pointed out that the people wiping out most of Florida’s farmland are developers, not the state agencies preserving land. Trying to replace the rural property lost to sprawl with land set for preservation seems particularly perverse.

Given the widespread furor that erupted when Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to put golf courses in the state parks, she said, “it makes me scratch my head. It’s basically selling the public’s right to use its land.”

If the House version of Simpson’s bill passes with the provision forbidding us from badmouthing the sugar barons, we’d all better learn a new version of that popular tune from the Disney film “Encanto” to say, “We don’t talk about sugar — no no no!”

But we should also spare some outrage for Simpson’s secretive plot to turn the Florida Wildlife Corridor into the Farmers and Ranchers Relief Corridor. If he thinks Big Sugar doesn’t like being badmouthed, wait till he hears what everyone’s going to say about HIM.