Florida Governor Charlie Crist said this week that the state will buy the company U.S. Sugar, so that it can shut it down as part of the Everglades restoration project. The sugar industry has been a sweet thorn in the side of environmentalists and state officials for decades, so this is big. It would be like Michigan buying and shutting down the Dow Chemical plant, or Louisiana buying back the oil and gas leases that are hindering its coastal wetlands restoration efforts.

Florida has been buying up land north of Lake Okeechobee and Everglades National Park for years now, but the acquisition of the 187,000 acres south of the lake is paramount to the success of the restoration efforts. Although it's known as the "River of Grass," Everglades only has two sources of water: rain and spillover from the lake. Once the Army Corps of Engineers built the Hoover Dike around the lake, largely to encourage agriculture in the area, the important year-round source of water for the 'glades dried up, with horrifying results. It's hard to imagine wetlands on fire, but that's exactly what happened (and a problem that still continues today).

Sugar cane isn't easily grown in Florida, and the taxpayers have been subsidizing the effort. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that of the $63 million it spends on flood control in central and south Florida, $52 million goes towards agriculture, and most of that for sugar cane. Also, phosphorous rich fertilizer needs to be applied for the crop to grow.

Although state scientists complained that runoff from plantations was causing eutrophication (i.e. death) of Lake Okeechobee, the federal government had to finally step in to sue the state for allowing damage to federal property (i.e. the Everglades). It took almost two decades for the case to finally be resolved because the sugar industry countered every legal attempt at holding it responsible for its actions with a counter lawsuit.

Some think U.S. Sugar is getting a sweeter deal than they deserve, with the state paying over $50 more per share than its initial offer. But, Big Sugar is notorious for buying its way into politics. The restrictive import quotas that the industry has fought so hard to maintain inflate the cost of refined sugar in the US as much as 2-3 times the going rate on the international market, resulting in an extra $1 billion in revenues for the industry.

A good portion of that money is used to lobby politicians, which explains how the 28 biggest producers receive 90 percent of federal aid. The cost of phosphorus runoff from sugar plantations is estimated to cost $3-$8 billion, yet the industry managed to negotiate paying just $300 million over 20 years

At any rate, the U.S. Sugar plantations account for a huge portion of the estimated 450,000 acres of sugar cane fields in central Florida. Shutting down the plant will not only save money in cleanup, but also in the flooding of the River of Grass, as now nature can take its course and the government can shelve the sophisticated and expensive hydraulic pumps that were being used instead.