Sugar industry pays for House trips to help safeguard subsidies

WASHINGTON — For decades, Congress has had the power to effectively kill the American sugar-growing industry, which employs thousands of family farms in western Minnesota. 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— lost on the House floor in 2018, but the existential threat to the industry did not vanish.

As the U.S. farm bill enters the final months of negotiations, ahead of hoped-for passage in a lame-duck Congress, groups associated with sugar growers and refiners have spent tens of thousands of dollars on trips for U.S. House staff. Hundreds have toured muddy sugar cane fields in Louisiana and Florida, as well as 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 — in an effort to maintain the status quo for America’s home-grown sugar producers.

On these trips, the sugar industry explains to a captive audience the importance of sugar to local economies.

The trips are a cornerstone of the industry’s influence strategy, along with donating millions of dollars to lawmakers’ campaigns and sending sugar farmers to Capitol Hill for face-to-face meetings with key decision-makers. The sugar industry also retains a top lobbyist, 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.

Sponsors maintain the tours are not meant to influence lawmakers’ votes.

“The trip[s] are designed for solely educational purposes,” said Harrison Weber, executive director of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Education Foundation.

Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Florida, 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.

“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.”

Opponents of the sugar industry, however, argue 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.

The sponsored trips are hardly luxurious, but they give U.S. House staffers 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 allies on Capitol Hill for key policy battles every five years.

Roughly twice a decade, federal lawmakers vote to reauthorize food and nutrition programs through the Farm Bill, including the lifeblood of the American sugar industry: the system of import tariffs and price supports that protect the industry from foreign competition.

Without the program, American sugar producers say 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.

“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 recent years in Florida, environmental groups and communities concerned about algal blooms in the Everglades and smoke from burning sugarcane have become increasingly vocal critics of the state’s sugar growers.

But that new opposition in Florida has so far failed to turn the tides against the sugar industry in Washington.

Beginning in the 1990s, sugar lobbies sponsored tours for staffers, including for lawmakers and staffers to attended so-called “Sweetener Symposiums,” in ski resort towns, California wine country and Asheville, N.C., to discuss federal agriculture policy.

Congress passed ethics reforms in 2007, ending the luxury tours. But companies found a work-around, incorporating educational-themed nonprofits to sponsor staff trips.

Among those on tours over the last decade include eight staffers for the House Agriculture Committee who formerly reported to Peterson, whose district encompassed the sugar-beet-fertile Red River Valley.

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.

American Crystal Sugar no longer hosts staff tours in the country’s sugar beet-growing heartland on the Minnesota-North Dakota border. Instead, the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Education Foundation regularly sponsors tours for staffers.

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.

Sugar industry tours peaked in 2018 — a Farm Bill year — including a surge in tours sponsored by the newly formed South Florida Agricultural Foundation, whose board 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.

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.

In a gift travel disclosure form filed with the House Ethics Committee 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.

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.

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 expiration of the 2018 Farm Bill on Monday 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 continued going on sugar-sponsored trips. Travel records show 185 trips since 2019.

This article was produced by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism, a student-powered newsroom that produces national projects. The lead authors of this story can be reached at pkiefer@umd.edu and aquevedo@umd.edu