New podcast examines sugar industry’s political power and mistreatment of workers

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• Amna Nawaz:

  Sugar is in many of the foods we eat every day, and that is not by accident.

  The multibillion-dollar sugar industry is the subject of a new podcast from iHeartMedia and Imagine Entertainment.

  Stephanie Sy has more.

• Stephanie Sy:

  The U.S. is the fifth largest sugar producer in the world, with more than 20 states supporting the industry. The average American consumes more than 100 pounds of sugar in a year, according to the USDA, more than citizens of any other country.

  And there is broad scientific consensus that too much sugar contributes to disease, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and fatty liver disease.

  Celeste Headlee is host of the podcast "Big Sugar." And she joins me now to talk about the industry's political power and the impact that's had on workers and public health.

  Celeste, thank you so much for joining the "NewsHour."

  So, I understand the idea of your podcast came from previous reporting starting in the 1980s from Alec Wilkinson, who wrote the book "Big Sugar," and Marie Brenner, who in 2001 wrote an article in "Vanity Fair."

  Why did you want to look at this issue again now?

  Celeste Headlee, Host, "Big Sugar": Well, because many of the issues that they were looking at, in terms of immigrant labor, visas, health care, the environment, they're still relevant today, and as well as the power that corporations and the people who are behind those corporations have over our politics.

  So, especially as the farm bill is up, as it rarely is, it's up for reconsideration again — it's only up for reconsideration every five years — we felt it was time.

• Stephanie Sy:

  And, of course, the farm bill would include a package of subsidies, including a sugar program.

  Let's get back to this question of migrant labor that the sugar industry had to contend and within the '70s and '80s, migrant workers who went to Florida mostly from Jamaica, 20,000 or so of them.

  I want to play a clip from your podcast where an attorney for the workers talks about the dangers of the job.

• Greg Shell, Attorney:

  You're swinging a machete eight or 10 hours a day, it's going to slip, or you're going to be careless, or the field will be uneven, or any number of things that will cause you to accidentally cut yourself.

  Every year, it was about a one-third of the workers were injured at work in a manner serious enough that it required them to miss at least one day of work. That's an awfully high percentage of the work force to be injured during the year.

• Stephanie Sy:

  So, Celeste, that lawyer, Greg Shell, files a lawsuit on behalf of the workers, saying they're underpaid.

  What changed as a result of that and other lawsuits?

• Celeste Headlee:

  Well, they ended up filing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of a large number of these workers.

  And they discovered some incredible things. At one point, they got a former U.S. sugar worker who gave us some — them some detail showing that these workers had been underpaid, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, they had documents showing that the companies had budgeted only $3 per ton, when, in fact, they should have been budgeting over $5 per ton, if they were paying what the U.S. government had said that they had to pay.

  So they had what seemed to have been a pretty tight case. What ended up happening was that a number of the sugar companies settled. One of the sugar companies owned by a couple of brothers from Cuba who had fled the Castro regime did not. They kept it in court for years and years and years and years. They ended up losing that case because of a centuries-old law, and they ultimately mechanized the fields.

  That's sort of the core of what this story is about. But it involves so much drama and intrigue. And, ultimately, these poor workers, they were just out tens of thousands of dollars. It's the kind of money that really could have transformed their lives.

• Stephanie Sy:

  So, justice was not fully served even after the settlements, it sounds like.

  I wonder if you see a connection between the ways migrant workers were treated in the sugarcane fields and the sugar beet fields and the ways migrant workers are treated today.

• Celeste Headlee:

  Although most of the sugar that is farmed in the United States is mechanized, it's still harvested by hands in many areas of the United States today.

  And what's more, we are still subsidizing the growing of sugar, to the tune of billions of dollars through that farm bill that we talked about before. In other words, we are paying growers millions of dollars to grow sugar. And, as consumers. We're paying more for our sugar when we get to the grocery store than almost any other nation is.

  So, our sugar is expensive in a number of different ways. And it's expensive in terms of labor itself. So it's the type of issue that is costly. And it's also costly to environment. I mean, it's just there's layers upon layers to the story.

• Stephanie Sy:

  For its part, the American Sugar Alliance, Celeste, says your podcast presents a — quote — "antiquated and inaccurate picture of the sugar industry from the 1980s."

  They say planting and harvesting is now mechanized and workers are unionized. Do you think they have rectified the big problems?

• Celeste Headlee:

  I stand by our journalism.

  They are correct that a quite a bit of our storytelling begins in the 1980s with the class action lawsuit that we were talking about. This is an investigative story. And so we begin in 1980s, but we bring it all the way forward to the present. And, like I said, we were very careful in our fact-checking and the journalism.

  And I stand by it. It is very carefully done. And you can rely on the facts that you get.

• Stephanie Sy:

  Celeste Headlee, host of "Big Sugar."

  Thanks so much, Celeste.

• Celeste Headlee:

  My pleasure.