It says, among other things, that, hey, those 9 billion gallons that are sent to the estuaries or kept in the lake aren't from our land. It's not our water.

That's true, but only because the water is rushed to tide out of the lake before the water would have naturally gone to the half-million acres where Big Sugar resides. In other words, the artificially created land in the EAA would be well under water in rainy seasons if Mother Nature had her way instead of the area being drained bone dry for the sole benefit of a subsidized and unneeded crop.

Fortunately, the water district folks are taking note of the Safe Level Plan approach. The obfuscations in the name of "water supply" scare talk are being treated with the skepticism they deserve.

Henderson and many other close observers with substantial technical expertise have debunked sugar's elaborate claims that their crops could be threatened by lower-water management in drought years. In truth, sugar's production in tons per acre has been the same or even higher in drought years, as lately as 2001.

Moreover, if there were an unexpected drought of the one year in a hundred variety, the EAA could take some losses just like unsubsidized farmers do everywhere, many buying crop insurance. The point is that the benefits of the lower-water policy would far, far outweigh any problems agriculture might face.

Big Agriculture would much prefer that we focus on the long, long future. That way, short-term profits would not be disturbed.

Obviously, we too must be concerned about the long, long future.

But in the short, short future we can make changes that will benefit the lake and our estuaries right away.

Put the water-fat lake system on the Zone D diet, now.

--Karl Wickstrom

Florida's Great Diversion

Although many complex factors contributed to Florida's Everglades crisis, none of them compares to the water woes caused by the reclamation scheme creating and perpetuating the Everglades Agricultural Area. In order to keep Big Ag dry, an average two billion gallons of water a day are diverted to the ocean, lowering water tables and threatening supplies.

The Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan hopes to alleviate much of the problem through reservoirs, storage wells and modifications but the effects of these changes are many years off. Subsidized sugar farmers are little affected.

More immediately, the Zone D diet and Safe Level Plan would allow the diverted water to be spread more gradually and to more areas.