WASHINGTON — For decades, Congress has had the power to effectively kill the American sugar-growing industry. In 2016, the vast majority of Republicans in the U.S. House endorsed a proposal to use that power.
The proposal — to eliminate financial and trade protections the sugar industry depends on for survival — lost on the House floor in 2018, but the existential threat to the industry did not vanish.
Since then, groups associated with sugar growers and refiners have spent tens of thousands of dollars for hundreds of U.S. House staff to tour muddy sugar cane fields in Louisiana and Florida and sugar beet factories in Minnesota, according to an analysis of House travel disclosure data from 2012 through 2023 compiled by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.
Sugar-linked organizations sponsored at least 335 trips for members of Congress or their staffers since 2012 — more than half of all agriculture-related trips by a relatively small branch of the agribusiness sector. Each trip represents travel by one U.S. House representative or staffer, either alone or as part of a delegation and sometimes with a family member.
On these trips, people who make a living — or corporate interests who make a fortune — from the sugar industry explain to a captive audience the importance of sugar to local economies.
The trips are a cornerstone of the industry’s influence strategy, along with better-known tactics such as pouring millions of dollars into lawmakers’ campaigns and sending sugar farmers to Capitol Hill for face-to-face meetings with key decision-makers. Those tactics complement the work of the sugar industry’s lobbyists, including former House Agriculture Committee Chair Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minnesota, a longtime champion of the industry until losing reelection in 2020.
The strategy appears to be working.
In 2016, the powerful Republican Study Committee — which represents 80% of House Republicans — called for the outright elimination of sugar industry protections. By 2019, the committee softened its stance, suggesting a slower “phasing out” of those protections.
This year, the committee shifted its support to an alternative plan endorsed by the sugar industry itself: ending federal protections for American sugar on the condition that competing sugar-growing countries end subsidies for their own sugar industries. The improbability of that condition means the protections for the industry could endure indefinitely — hence sugar producers’ support for the proposal, according to scholars at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
The Republican Study Committee cited the advocacy of Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Florida, in the shift in its attitude toward sugar. Cammack is one of the dozens of lawmakers to send staffers on trips sponsored by sugar-related nonprofits and accept campaign contributions from sugar-related donors. Before taking office, she worked for one of the House lawmakers whose staff most frequently traveled with nonprofits tied to sugar.
“When we make policy decisions that could potentially impact millions of Americans, we want to be as informed as possible, which includes staff traveling to see the very commodities and to speak directly with the farmers who make their livings in these industries,” Cammack spokesperson Adeline Sandridge said. “Furthermore, these trips are approved by the House Ethics Committee months in advance. … It’s important that staffers see firsthand the effects of their policies — traveling to the very sites is one of the best ways to do it.”
But opponents of the sugar industry said the strategic value of bringing hundreds of staffers to the sugar industry’s home turf is obvious.
“If you think of this from the sugar company’s perspective, this is an investment. It’s a way to sort of spread good vibes about what they’re doing, and to influence people who are then going to turn around and be able to influence others,” said Gil Smart, executive director of the Florida environmental advocacy group VoteWater.
Sponsors, however, maintain the tours are not meant to influence lawmakers’ votes.
“The trip[s] are designed for solely educational purposes,” said Harrison Weber, director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Education Foundation, an educational nonprofit that sponsors annual tours for congressional staff. Weber also serves as executive director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, a political organization that funds the foundation’s trips, among other programs, and represents a majority of the sugar growers who collectively own the American Crystal Sugar Company.
IN THE FIELDS
The sponsored trips are hardly luxurious, but they give U.S. House staffers — some influential, some eager to learn — a few days of face-to-face time with sugar farmers and mill managers. For the sugar industry, the trips are a chance to build a new bench of loyal allies on Capitol Hill for key policy battles every five years.
Roughly twice a decade, federal lawmakers vote to reauthorize a vast array of agriculture- and nutrition-related programs collectively known as the Farm Bill. The package also includes the lifeblood of the American sugar industry: the system of import tariffs and price supports that protect the industry from foreign competition, otherwise known as the federal sugar program.
Without the program, American sugar producers argue their jobs could disappear as cheaper foreign sugar floods the American market.
But a coalition of libertarian economists, the confectionary industry and — increasingly — environmentalists consistently organize opposition to the sugar industry. And these anti-sugar advocates have rallied a bipartisan bloc of lawmakers to challenge the federal sugar program on Capitol Hill.
“The sugar program is literally like an Econ 101 example of protectionism in action and how a small minority of people reap the benefits of protectionism while the majority have to bear its costs,” said Colin Grabow, associate director of the Cato Institute’s Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies.
In years past, sugar industry leaders were open about the key role staff travel plays in their influence strategy.
From 1993 to 2007, the American Sugar Cane League, Florida Sugar Cane League and American Crystal Sugar — co-ops that represent growers and processors in three of the country’s major sugar-growing regions — collectively sponsored dozens of tours for House lawmakers and staffers.
American Crystal Sugar, the Florida Sugar Cane League and the American Sugar Cane League did not respond to requests for comment.
“The staff tour has become legendary on the Hill,” wrote American Sugar Cane League General Manager Jim Simon in a December 2004 issue of The Sugar Bulletin, the league’s newsletter. “The event provides us with an excellent opportunity to impress upon staffers just how important sugar is to our economy.”
The national trade group for sugar producers, the American Sugar Alliance, paid for House lawmakers and staffers to attend “Sweetener Symposiums” in ritzy ski resort towns, California wine country and Asheville, North Carolina, to discuss federal agriculture policy.
But Congress’ passage of landmark ethics reforms in 2007 brought those luxurious tours to a halt. Because the sugar producers that sponsored the largest share of trips before 2007 retain federal lobbyists, they could no longer host their annual multi-day tours after the reforms.
Sugar industry leaders across the country found a workaround.
In the country’s sugar beet-growing heartland on the Minnesota-North Dakota border, American Crystal Sugar no longer hosts staff tours. Instead, the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Education Foundation regularly sponsors tours for staffers.
In Louisiana, a group of sugar insiders formed the nonprofit Louisiana Sugar Cane Foundation in 2009 to host annual tours of the state’s sugar industry. On paper, the nonprofit is unrelated to the American Sugar Cane League, though the group lists the P.O. box of a sugar mill tied to the league as its mailing address.
Since 2007, sugar-related organizations almost exclusively sponsor travel to sugar-growing regions, and sponsored visits to luxury resort destinations appear to be a thing of the past.
ON THE HILL
Staffers for members on the House Agriculture Committee — the committee responsible for drafting the Farm Bill — were overrepresented among House staff who attended tours sponsored by nonprofits tied to the sugar industry over the last decade.
They included eight staffers, both junior and senior, who reported to Peterson, whose former western Minnesota district includes the Red River Valley.
Peterson was an architect of the 2008 Farm Bill and served as the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee during the drafting of the 2013 and 2018 Farm Bills. After losing his reelection bid in 2020 — despite financial backing from the sugar industry — Peterson became a lobbyist for the American Sugar Alliance, among other clients.
Peterson’s lobbying firm did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Howard Center reached out to 58 current and former House staff who attended tours sponsored by nonprofits tied to the sugar industry. None agreed to provide comments on record.
But in gift travel disclosure forms filed with the House Ethics Committee, some staff hinted at the purpose of their travel. In a disclosure form filed ahead of a 2019 tour held by the Louisiana Sugar Cane Foundation, former House Agriculture Committee Chief Counsel Prescott Martin III wrote that because his duties included drafting and negotiating sugar-related legislation — including the federal sugar program — the visit to Louisiana would help him “directly assess the function and effectiveness of my past and future involvement.” Martin now serves as a deputy general counsel in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the General Counsel.
At the other end of the spectrum, a bipartisan group of lawmakers have repeatedly — and unsuccessfully — attempted to repeal or reform the federal sugar program over the past decade. In 2012, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-New Hampshire, introduced an amendment that would repeal the program. Citing what she called “very egregious government controls on sugar,” Shaheen proposed a repeal that would “phase out the sugar program over several years and eliminate government control of sugar prices.” Shaheen’s effort failed.
Over the next year, Shaheen scaled back her ambitious goal to propose two amendments that would reform aspects of the sugar program through changes such as adjusting tariff quotas to provide “adequate supplies of sugar at reasonable prices.” After two unsuccessful votes, the law remained unchanged.
A similar challenge to the sugar program came five years later during deliberations on the 2018 Farm Bill. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina — who has referred to the federal sugar program as a “reverse Robin Hood program” — introduced an amendment that would have reformed the program by reducing loan rates for sugar growers and lifting constraints on domestic supplies of sugar. The Foxx amendment also called for “adequate supplies at reasonable prices.”
That amendment, which reflected the Republican Study Committee’s criticisms of the program, also failed to pass — a victory the sugar industry attributed to its outreach efforts.
“The vote reflects years of diligent effort from our sugarcane farmers to educate Congress about sugar policy which operates at no cost to the public,” wrote then-American Sugar Cane League President Charles Schudmak in a statement on the league’s website.
Shaheen and Foxx’s offices declined to comment on the record.
The number of staff attending sugar industry tours peaked in 2018 — a Farm Bill year — including a surge in tours sponsored by the newly formed South Florida Agricultural Foundation, the board of which includes the spouse of Ryan Duffy, U.S. Sugar’s director of corporate communications.
One staffer who attended a trip to Louisiana told the Howard Center the nonprofits explicitly mentioned the importance of the Farm Bill and federal sugar program during refinery tours and conversations with local farmers.
Opposition to the federal sugar program did not vanish after 2018.
In recent years in Florida, environmental groups and communities concerned about algal blooms in the Everglades and smoke from sugarcane burning have become increasingly vocal critics of the state’s sugar growers.
But that new opposition in Florida has failed thus far to turn the tides against the sugar industry in Washington.
Cammack — the key sugar ally who sits on the House Agriculture Committee — told reporters she does not believe opponents of the federal sugar program have gained ground in Congress since 2018.
The House and Senate agriculture committees indicated possible reforms to the sugar program in the Farm Bill frameworks released in early May. The House framework, for instance, suggests the 2024 Farm Bill will “moderniz[e] marketing loans and sugar policy,” though the language is vague about what that modernization would entail.
But negotiations on the next iteration of the Farm Bill have been stalled for months, in part because of a $30 billion cut to the SNAP program proposed by Congressional Republicans. The 2018 Farm Bill expired at midnight on September 30, which agricultural groups warn creates dire economic insecurity for farmers who have struggled to turn profits in the face of rising input costs.
The expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill does not mean the end of the federal sugar program. But other programs shut down immediately, including one supporting the domestic biofuels industry, which uses U.S.-grown sugar crops.
Meanwhile, House staffers have kept traveling on the sugar dime. Travel records show 185 trips since 2019.
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