Word: sugar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...miles down the road from where Shervington stopped to talk with the farmer is Kajaki Sofla, a bustling town on the banks of the Helmand River that is the local Taliban headquarters. It holds the region's largest bazaar, an essential stop for daily necessities like tea, oil and sugar. To get to the bazaar, travelers must pass through a Taliban checkpoint, where they are taxed and interrogated. Those suspected of collaborating with the British are beaten, or worse. Shervington can do nothing about it. All he can do is pace his area of operations like a caged lion, impotent...
June 24 may have been the day we stopped flunking that test. Governor Charlie Crist announced a stunning deal for Florida to buy the U.S. Sugar Corp., including 187,000 acres of farmland in the northern Everglades that will be used for restoration. Activists who have battled Florida's powerful sugar industry for decades were giddy. Engineers who have struggled to revive the Everglades without disrupting Big Sugar were flabbergasted. "I'm flabbergasted, too," Crist told TIME. He called the $1.75 billion deal as "monumental" as the creation of Yellowstone, and he may be right...
...Sugar would clearly have ramifications. Florida Crystals, the agribusiness controlled by the well-wired Fanjul family, would be all that's left of Big Sugar. Founded by General Motors executive Charles Stuart Mott in the Everglades back in 1931, U.S. Sugar currently produces 9% of America's sugar - thanks to a massive federal water-control project that its executives helped design and a lucrative federal sugar program that artificially boosts its prices. The company has always been popular in its headquarters of Clewiston ("The World's Sweetest Town"), but labor activists have accused it of mistreating its workers and environmental...
...Sugar did block the flow and suck the water out of the Everglades, converting its saw grass marshes into cattail clumps and inspiring one of the most contentious pollution lawsuits in U.S. history. But ever since the litigation was settled in the mid-1990s, Big Sugar has done an impressive job of cleaning up its act, and development has become a much greater threat to the health of the Everglades. Still, U.S. Sugar executives have often warned that they might build condos someday, and environmentalists have dreamed of locking up their land...
...their dreams appear to be coming true. They're about to become part-owners of Big Sugar. "This could be a game changer," said Everglades activist Alan Farago before the press conference was held. "The biggest obstacle has always been the EAA. Now we can try to salvage restoration." There are still plenty of details to be worked out, like how the state will raise cash during a fiscal crisis, and the sugar industry has a troublesome history in Florida. The Crist administration will have to negotiate land swaps with Florida Crystals, and it will have to figure out what...