Pastor Steve Messam was driving to a service on Christmas morning when he looked to the sky and watched the first flakes starting to fall. Lighter at first, then thicker and more frequent, not quite a blizzard, but enough to leave a coating on the porch and parking lot of his First Church of God in South Bay, Florida.
This was, however, no picturesque winter holiday scene – just a regular day during harvesting season in the nation’s largest sugar-growing region. The “black snow”, as locals call it, is ash from burning sugarcane fields. Studies have blamed the smoke generated by the fires, sometimes dozens a day, for respiratory problems and increased mortality among the poor, mostly immigrant population of the rural area south of Lake Okeechobee known as the Glades.
“I was like, wow, they’re even burning it on Christmas Day,” said Messam, a co-founder of the Stop the Burn campaign that is seeking an end to the daily burns they say make life miserable and dangerous during the eight-month harvest season from fall until spring.
“You have these big smoke clouds in the air, just hovering over our cities. It’s just part of life here, but you notice it when it hits your body or you open a door. It’s on your porch, on your car, it gets in your hair,” he explained.
“We call it black snow because it falls from the sky just like snowflakes. But it’s just the burnt trash blowing from the cane. I know people who’ve had to move out of the Glades because their respiratory issues got so bad during the burn season.”
To hear the $13bn sugar industry tell it, there is no problem here. The Clewiston-based US Sugar Corporation, which farms more than 230,000 acres across four counties and employs about 2,500 people, touts its own studies regularly claiming “the Glades communities have air that is good, safe and clean”, and insisting those who say otherwise are “dishonest anti-farming activists”.
The burns, it says, are necessary to remove the top leaves of the plants and leave the ripe sugarcane ready for easy harvesting. And it claims they only happen on days when weather conditions dictate communities won’t be affected.
Yet the evidence against is more than just anecdotal. A 2022 study by scientists at Florida State University found that up to five deaths a year in south Florida can be attributed to fine particulate matter in cane-burning smoke. The mortality risk is highest for people living in the sugar growing region.
A 2021 collaboration between ProPublica and the Palm Beach Post determined, among numerous other findings, that hospital admissions for respiratory distress in Belle Glade, a town in the heart of sugar country, increased up to 35% in the harvesting season.
Researchers at Florida International University found in 2015 that levels of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) present in the air at Belle Glade were 15 times higher during harvesting season than the summer growing season.
Nasa routinely observes from space the smoke pollution from burning sugar canes; and in a latest development, Florida Atlantic University and partners have landed a $4.2m grant from the National Institutes of Health to conduct a five-year study in sugar country into the impact of smoke exposure from agricultural fires on the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
“It’s the go-to propaganda of big sugar to say there’s an anti-farming bias, and to write the campaign off as radical environmentalists, but those narratives fall apart when you have academic institutions providing hard data on the negative impacts caused by their practices,” said Patrick Ferguson, an attorney and senior organizing representative for the Sierra Club’s stop sugar-field burning campaign.
US Sugar, in keeping with its approach to other media outlets seeking comment, did not respond to questions from the Guardian. But it asserts on its website it has been a victim of “false attacks by outside activist groups and paid news reports”.
That rankles with Messam, who says the Stop the Burn campaign consists almost entirely of Glades residents concerned for their health, supported by experts such as the Florida chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. A number of doctors joined a protest outside the West Palm Beach headquarters of the Florida health department in November demanding that “as a bare minimum” it starts issuing health warnings to residents when burning takes place.
To US Sugar’s claim the campaign is “anti-farming”, Messam, a longtime Glades resident whose son, he says, needed a nebulizer until the age of 10 to help him breathe, added: “I love the agriculture industry, and my father was a cane cutter.
“You just have the industry pushing back and trying to blackball folks for speaking up and trying to get change, but more folks are speaking out now, those whose jobs or income aren’t tied to the industry, and who don’t have the fear of retaliation.”
Among them is Ras Benjahman, a 76-year-old retiree from Lake Harbor with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who says he occasionally has to move into a hotel for days at a time when the burns come close to his home. He says the industry’s insistence the air is clean does not stack up with his reality of ruined laundry, plants that won’t grow, a constant sticky black film on his windows and doors, and the pervasive smell of smoke even inside his home.
“It’s false equivalence,” he told the Guardian. “They do it to justify their years of failure.”
Stop the Burn says it wants the sugar industry to instead utilize mechanical green harvesting methods that have been successful elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club has filed a civil rights complaint to the Environmental Protection Agency claiming the Florida forest service, which authorizes the sugar industry’s “prescribed burns”, discriminates against predominantly Black communities.
But the sugar industry has deep pockets to pay for expensive lawyers and influential lobbyists able to place obstacles in the way of the quest for environmental justice. For instance Florida’s Right to Farm Act, passed in 2021, banned “nuisance” lawsuits against farmers challenging their operations, and limited the ability of local authorities to regulate agriculture, handing power instead to state officials.
“It was blatantly designed to close the courthouse doors to folks that are negatively impacted by this practice, and shows how much influence the sugar industry has,” Ferguson said.
“But our success has been in raising public awareness of sugarcane burning and its negative impacts. When we started there was minimal awareness outside of the impacted areas. Now it’s a national issue with national attention.”
