Word: sugars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Everglades is already the focus of the largest ecosystem restoration ever, but that effort has stumbled and stalled. What Crist's deal can do is change the political ecosystem. Sugar fields pollute the Everglades, dump water on it when it's flooded and suck water out of it when it's dry; Big Sugar, opponents say, has used its political dominance in Florida to block efforts to restore the flow of the River of Grass. By essentially bribing U.S. Sugar out of business, Crist not only frees up its land but also eliminates an implacable obstacle to restoration...
...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...