Twenty-Two Minutes

Money, the American sugar program, and the defense of a protected market

Presidents' Day, 1996

On the morning of February 19, 1996, Vice President Al Gore stood in Everglades National Park and announced a plan to levy a tax of one cent per pound on Florida sugar growers. The proceeds would help fund a cleanup of the Everglades, whose waters had been degraded by decades of agricultural runoff flowing south from the cane fields below Lake Okeechobee. The announcement and the sequence of events that followed it that afternoon were reconstructed in detail by Jeffrey Klein in Mother Jones in November 1998, working from White House phone logs that had entered the public record.

A few hours after Gore spoke, a call came in to the White House for the President. The Starr Report, House Document 105-310, records what happened next. “Consistent with Ms. Lewinsky's recollection of a call from a sugar grower named ‘Fanuli,’ the President talked with Alfonso Fanjul of Palm Beach, Florida, from 12:42 to 1:04 p.m.” Twenty-two minutes, on a federal holiday, within hours of the announcement. Alfonso Fanjul was chairman and chief executive of Flo-Sun, the family sugar enterprise that held Florida Crystals. The primary document confirms that this call occurred and lasted twenty-two minutes. It happened the day the administration proposed making sugar growers pay for the Everglades.

We know the White House quietly set the plan aside, if not why. When it resurfaced that November as a Florida ballot initiative, the sugar industry spent an estimated $25 million against it. It failed. Klein reported that the Fanjuls contributed roughly $3.6 million to that campaign, and that a Fanjul company, Flo-Sun Land, sent the Clinton campaign a $50,000 contribution timed close enough to Election Day that it would not surface in press coverage before the vote.

This paper is about the machine that twenty-two minutes of presidential time was spent defending.

The American sugar program is one of the oldest and most durable market protections in the federal code. It has survived free-trade administrations of both parties, repeated reform amendments, its own economics, and every farm bill since 1981. The record assembled below, from government documents, court records, and the QPQ Tracker's own data, supports a simple description.

Out of Cuba

The Fanjuls did not arrive in Florida as strangers to sugar. Through marriage the family led the Gómez-Mena empire, one of the largest sugar holdings in pre-revolutionary Cuba, with 150,000 acres and ten mills. Marie Brenner's February 2001 Vanity Fair investigation, In the Kingdom of Big Sugar, records the family's standing among the island's nine great sugar clans. The Lobos were considered the most decent of them. The Gómez-Menas had a reputation for ruthlessness. While the young Alfy and Pepe Fanjul attended dances at the Havana Yacht Club, Brenner wrote, Cuba's half million cane cutters virtually starved for the six months of each year the harvest did not employ them. Havana's Museum of the Revolution today devotes display cases to conditions in the sugar fields, and presents them as part of what brought the Batista government down. The anger of the cane fields was fuel for Castro's revolution, and in 1959 the revolution arrived at the family's door. Rebels laid their machine guns on the conference table at the headquarters on the street named for the family's patriarch, circled the wall map, and announced that all of it now belonged to the state. The childhood home of Alfy and Pepe Fanjul is today one of Fidel Castro's former residences.

The family fled to Florida and landed inside an extraordinary piece of timing. After Castro's victory the United States embargoed Cuban sugar, stripped Cuba of its American sugar quota, and created what Brenner describes as massive incentives for domestic production, an economic campaign aimed squarely at the island's one great export. Engineers were draining thousands of acres of Everglades swamp, the continuation of the Army Corps of Engineers' Central and Southern Florida flood-control project that had carved the Everglades Agricultural Area out of the marsh, and U.S. Sugar was expanding rapidly onto the new land. The Fanjuls bought three dilapidated Louisiana mills for $165,000, barged them to a 4,000-acre parcel called Osceola Farms, and took their first crop in the 1961-62 season. The empire that Castro seized was rebuilt on drained American wetland, financed in part by an American policy of making sugar grown against Cuba pay.

The subsidy program

Sugar protection is nearly as old as the republic. Congress taxed imported sugar from 1789, set import quotas from the Depression onward under the Sugar Act of 1934, and kept some version of quota protection in place until the Act lapsed in 1974. What happened next created the modern program. A 1974 price spike drove the industry into overproduction and the bottom fell out of the market. The government rushed in with guaranteed loans and financing, and Brenner records the industry realization that followed. If prices fell short, growers could forfeit their crops to the government and could not lose money converting cattle or vegetable acreage to cane. The 1981 farm bill wrote the arrangement into Title I, where it has lived ever since.

The mechanics interlock. The Department of Agriculture makes nonrecourse loans to processors at a statutory floor price, which growers can satisfy by forfeiting sugar rather than repaying cash. This sets an artificial price floor for the US sugar industry, regardless of global market conditions. The US sugar market has a guaranteed minimum. The global market does not. Tariff-rate quotas then erect trade barriers by restricting the amount of foreign sugar that can enter before prohibitive duties apply. And when supply still outruns demand, the Feedstock Flexibility Program directs the government to buy surplus sugar and resell it to ethanol producers at a loss.

The domestic price holds reliably above the world price. Because Americans pay for it in higher grocery, health and manufacturing prices rather than as an appropriation, it appears in no budget line. The health share of that bill is measurable. A 2016 study in JAMA Internal Medicine by CDC researchers, Siegel and colleagues, found that US adults who consumed the most calories from subsidized food commodities, sugar prominent among them, had a 14 to 41 percent higher probability of obesity, abnormal blood sugar, elevated CRP and other cardiometabolic risk factors than those who consumed the least.

Said plainly, losing money as a US sugar producer is almost impossible. American fiscal hawks do not notice because this US government support is not a simple transfer payment. Instead of stemming from simple wealth redistribution, the culprit is market manipulation created by political interference. That political interference comes at the behest of the American sugar industry.

In its October 2023 report, GAO-24-106144, the Government Accountability Office estimated the value of intervention for America's sugar producers. According to the GAO, they receive an estimated $1.4 to $2.7 billion per year in additional benefits from the program, and studies the GAO reviewed put the cost to consumers at $2.5 to $3.5 billion per year. Roughly forty-five congressional districts grow sugar, but every American buys food. The concentrated benefit set against a diffuse cost is the textbook condition under which a small industry can outspend and outlast the general public, and the sugar industry is the textbook case.

In 1998, Klein, citing the General Accounting Office, put the program's value to the Fanjul family alone at $65 million a year, flowing through Florida Crystals and the family's share of the American Sugar Refining group.

What the defense costs

Although the QPQ Tracker's lobbying coverage is currently limited to 2023 through 2025, that period captures the current farm bill fight from filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The U.S. Beet Sugar Association reported at least $8.87 million in lobbying spending. American Crystal Sugar Company, the Moorhead, Minnesota cooperative, reported $8.47 million. The American Sugar Alliance, the joint cane-and-beet trade association, reported $5.96 million. The Southern Minnesota Beet Sugar Cooperative reported $3.72 million. Florida Crystals reported $3.58 million. The Florida Sugar Cane League reported $840,000. The filings name their subject in plain language, over and over. Farm bill. Sugar program. Implementation of the 2018 sugar program. Legislation affecting the U.S. sugar program.

The tracker also holds the sugar industry's itemized campaign giving. American Crystal Sugar's PAC has given $1.18 million. The American Sugar Cane League's PAC has given $1.43 million. The recipients concentrate exactly where a program written in the farm bill would predict. Friends of Glenn Thompson, the committee of the House Agriculture Committee chairman, received $58,500 across seventeen contributions in 2023 and 2024. Klobuchar for Minnesota received $55,500 across eighteen. Jim Costa for Congress received $31,000. The DSCC has received $282,500 from sugar PACs since 2015. Sugar money is rigorously bipartisan. The industry buys insurance and hedges.

In July 2024, Florida Crystals Corporation gave $1 million to Make America Great Again Inc., the super PAC supporting Donald Trump's presidential campaign. In 2023 and 2024, United States Sugar Corporation gave $500,000 in two checks, and Florida Crystals another $250,000, to Project Rescue America, the super PAC supporting Senator Rick Scott's re-election. Project Rescue America raised $10.76 million in that cycle, which makes the tracked sugar money roughly 7 percent of the committee's total.

Reform, meanwhile, gets introduced and dies. The Sugar Reform Act, S.832, was introduced in March 2023. It did not advance. Instead, the 2018 sugar program carried forward under Public Law 115-334.

The machine at work

The clearest single demonstration of the machine at work remains the 1996 farm bill. That spring, Representative Dan Miller of Florida sponsored a measure to phase out the sugar program entirely. The coalition behind it was, on paper, unbeatable. Fiscal conservatives opposed the program, calling it corporate welfare. Food manufacturers opposed it because it inflated their input costs. Environmentalists opposed it because of the Everglades. Consumer advocates opposed it because it doubled retail sugar prices. Only those forty-five sugar districts had a constituent interest in keeping it.

Still, the measure failed 217 to 208. Klein's reconstruction records that six members who had co-signed the bill switched their votes at the end, and five more did not vote. The Clinton White House, weeks after the Fanjul call, offered no support for the measure. Speaker Gingrich did not push his side either. What the leadership did instead was amend the farm bill so that $200 million of public money would go toward Everglades cleanup, removing the environmental pressure while leaving the program intact. Senator Bob Dole sponsored that provision in the Senate in the months before his presidential run. José Fanjul served on Dole's campaign finance committee. Alfonso served as a co-chairman of the Clinton campaign in Florida in 1992.

A proposal that threatened the program appeared. Money and access were applied. The proposal disappeared. A tracker built on itemized public records can document the pattern, every year.

The Everglades

The river of grass is fed by water that now passes through several hundred thousand acres of sugarcane in the Everglades Agricultural Area. Its restoration has been, for thirty years, hostage to an industry built, sustained and subsidized by the US government. The thread runs continuously from Gore's penny-a-pound proposal of 1996 to the land fights of the last two decades, and the money followed the thread.

In June 2008, Governor Charlie Crist announced what would have been the largest conservation land purchase in Florida history. The state would buy United States Sugar Corporation outright, 187,000 acres south of Lake Okeechobee, for $1.75 billion, and then retire the land for restoration. NPR reported the announcement on June 24, 2008. What closed, twenty-eight months later, was something else. After the financial crisis, litigation, and a sustained opposition campaign in which Florida Crystals fought the deal, the purchase closed in October 2010 at just 26,800 acres for $197 million, per the Congressional Research Service.

Crist's political career and the deal's collapse ran on the same clock. The money moved as the deal shrank. A Treasure Coast Newspapers analysis published in July 2016 found that sugar industry contributions since 2011 totaled $2.7 million across six Florida politicians and the state party apparatus. The two largest individual beneficiaries were Rick Scott, whose political committee received nearly $980,000, including almost $960,000 from U.S. Sugar, and Marco Rubio, who, with his supporting super PAC, received $486,765, mostly from the Fanjul family. Rubio took Crist's Senate seat in 2010 after Crist left the party, with the Fanjuls behind him from that first Senate run onward. He opposed completing the land purchase and argued for water storage north of the lake, the same position U.S. Sugar was advancing in newspaper advertisements at the time. Asked directly by a reporter in 2016 whether Fanjul money influenced that position, Rubio did not answer.

The cutters

The industry that Everglades drainage made possible was harvested by hand for thirty years, and the hands were rented from the Caribbean. Under the federal H-2 guest worker program, Florida's sugar mills brought in roughly ten thousand cutters a season through the 1980s, most of them Jamaican, housed in remote camps on the farms. Alfy Fanjul himself told Brenner that the development of the farmworker program was what really made the business take off. The program's discipline was deportation. Cutters were assigned a task rate, a number of feet of cane to cut per hour. Those who fell behind were checked out and sent to sit on the bus. Three check-outs and a man could be fired and flown home, and Brenner records that men who refused work were marked with a code meaning do not rehire. In the entire Southeast, one Department of Labor official monitored the conditions.

The wage arithmetic was the quiet part. As the University of California's Rural Migration News reconstructed from the litigation record, the mills' job orders promised terms that worked out to $5.30 a ton, but the task rates were set in feet, only the companies knew the tonnage in each field, and the mills budgeted about $3.75 a ton. Class actions filed in 1989 on behalf of the cutters claimed roughly $100 million in back wages. In August 1992 a Florida judge agreed and ordered $1,000 to $1,500 per cutter. U.S. Sugar settled its share for $5.6 million. The mills owned by the Fanjuls, Okeelanta and Atlantic, appealed instead, persuaded juries that the contracts had never explicitly promised a per-ton rate, and paid the cutters nothing.

The men had little leverage to object. When cutters struck at Okeelanta in November 1986, the response was police with dogs and the mass deportation of roughly three hundred workers, an episode contemporaneously reported by the Sun-Sentinel and documented in the historian Cindy Hahamovitch's scholarship on the program, where it is remembered as the Dog War. The Washington Post's 1989 report, The Bitter Lot of the Sugar Cane Cutter, noted that it had taken the Labor Department twelve years of litigation just to get toilets into the fields. After the wage lawsuits, the industry mechanized the entire Florida harvest within a few years, and the cutters were not needed at all. The sugar towns they left behind, Belle Glade, Pahokee and South Bay, remain among the poorest places in the United States.

The labor, offshore

The program's beneficiaries do not only grow sugar in Florida. Central Romana Corporation is the largest private landowner, employer, and sugar producer in the Dominican Republic, and its cane is overwhelmingly harvested by Haitian migrant workers. Mother Jones, in a September 2021 investigation conducted with the Fund for Investigative Journalism, reported that Central Romana is owned in part by Alfonso and Pepe Fanjul, that the family acquired it in 1984, and that its raw sugar ships to the Fanjuls' American Sugar Refining plant in Baltimore, where roughly one in seven tons arriving at the refinery originated at Central Romana's port.

What the family bought in 1984 was already notorious. The operation came out of Gulf & Western's Dominican holdings, and Brenner reports that a lawyer close to the conglomerate's late chairman, preparing the sugar business for sale, went down to inspect the cane cutters' barracks and found them “one degree short of Dachau.” The next day, by his account, Alfy Fanjul walked in to buy. The family closed the $240 million acquisition, and the conditions outlived the change in ownership. Human Rights Watch documented forced Haitian labor in the Dominican harvest in a 1990 report. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's 2005 documentary Big Sugar filmed cutters on Central Romana land working twelve-hour days for around two dollars.

In November 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a Withhold Release Order against Central Romana, barring its sugar from American ports on information reasonably indicating forced labor. CBP stated that its investigation had identified five of the International Labour Organization's eleven indicators. Abuse of vulnerability. Isolation. Withholding of wages. Abusive working and living conditions. Excessive overtime. Central Romana has denied that its workers labor under forced conditions. Then, in March 2025, CBP modified the order without explanation, and its public listing now shows the ban inactive. The Dominican Republic's industry ministry welcomed what it described as the normalization of Dominican sugar's access to the American market. The Department of Labor's List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor has, throughout, included Dominican sugarcane.

The “science”

In 2016, researchers at the University of California, San Francisco published an analysis of the Sugar Research Foundation's internal documents in JAMA Internal Medicine. They studied a 1965 project to fight the growing national concern about sugar's role in coronary heart disease.

The foundation commissioned a literature review from three Harvard nutritionists and paid them $6,500, equivalent to about $48,900 in 2016 dollars. A two-part review published in the New England Journal of Medicine followed in 1967. The review discounted the evidence against sugar and directed suspicion toward fat. It did not disclose that the Sugar Research Foundation funded it. NEJM did not require such disclosures until 1984.

The JAMA authors discussed documents showing that the industry paid for a review, shaped its scope, and received a conclusion favorable to sugar at the time the country was debating the question. The health consensus that followed, which treated fat as the villain and carbohydrates as safe, held for a generation. The bill for that generation is the one the CDC researchers priced in 2016, in the cardiometabolic profiles of the Americans who ate what the subsidies made cheap.

Reading it in the tracker

Every tracker figure in this paper resolves to a live entity page, and the claims above can be re-run against the underlying rows. Florida Crystals Corporation holds $1.26 million in tracked giving, including the MAGA Inc. contribution. United States Sugar Corporation holds $525,000, including both Project Rescue America checks. The merged American Crystal Sugar Company PAC and the American Sugar Cane League PAC carry the committee giving, and Make America Great Again Inc. and Project Rescue America carry the receipts. Each donation row carries its FEC source link.

The tracker's FEC itemization window effectively begins in 2015 and is densest from 2023 onward, so the historical episodes above rest on the cited documents. Florida state money, where much of the industry's Tallahassee influence originates, is outside the tracker's current database. The Fanjul family's personal giving is spread across 28 fragmented tracker rows under various name spellings. Alfonso, José senior, José junior, Andrés, Alexander, and Emilia Fanjul are different people and are kept separate. The rows sum, across all family variants, to roughly $1.8 million in the post-2015 window, a figure usable only with that fragmentation caveat attached until row-by-row verification against FEC records completes.

The shape of the machine

When a threat to the program appears, whether a phase-out amendment with majority logic behind it, a vice president's tax, a governor's land deal, a wage lawsuit, a scientific finding, or an import ban, money is then applied. A White House call and a well-timed contribution in 1996. A $25 million campaign against a ballot initiative. Contributions flowing to the politicians who decide whether the state completes a land purchase. Appeals that outlast the cutters who won at trial. A commissioned literature review. Seven-figure annual lobbying expenditures. The threat goes away. The program lives on. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. History and the tracker document how the same families and organizations paid at every decision point across six decades, ensuring the program's survival.

The sugar program will be before Congress again in the next farm bill cycle. The lobbying filings for that fight are already in the tracker and are updated quarterly. The contributions are itemized nightly at the FEC. Whatever happens to the next reform amendment will be public and traceable here.

Sources

Referral from Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr, H. Doc. 105-310, 105th Congress, 1998. Jeffrey Klein, Sweet Rewards, Mother Jones, November 1998. Government Accountability Office, Sugar Program, GAO-24-106144, October 2023. Kearns, Schmidt, and Glantz, Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research, JAMA Internal Medicine 2016;176:1680-1685. Siegel et al., Association of Higher Consumption of Foods Derived From Subsidized Commodities With Adverse Cardiometabolic Risk, JAMA Internal Medicine 2016;176(8):1124-1132. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Withhold Release Order on Central Romana, November 23, 2022, and the March 2025 modification as reported by Sandler, Travis & Rosenberg. Sandy Tolan and Euclides Cordero Nuel, The High Human Cost of America's Sugar Habit, Mother Jones, September 2021. Marie Brenner, In the Kingdom of Big Sugar, Vanity Fair, February 2001. Big Sugar, CBC, dir. Brian McKenna, 2005. Human Rights Watch, Harvesting Oppression, 1990. NPR, June 24, 2008. Congressional Research Service, R41383. Isadora Rangel, Treasure Coast Newspapers, July 9, 2016 and November 3, 2016. Bloomberg, January 28, 2016. Cindy Hahamovitch, Reform, Revolution, and the Secret Rebellion in Florida's Sugarcane Fields, Journal of Peasant Studies, 2008, and No Man's Land (Princeton, 2011). Sun-Sentinel, December 8, 1986. The Washington Post, September 17, 1989. Rural Migration News, UC Davis, March 2021. Reveal, The Bitter Work Behind Sugar, 2022. Florida Phoenix, September 12, 2024. FEC committee records C00825851 and C00837427. Lobbying Disclosure Act filings 2023 through 2025 and the QPQ Tracker production database, queried July 29 and 30, 2026.