The National Association of Black Journalists announced Wednesday “Black Snow: Big Sugar’s Burning Problem” by ProPublica and The Palm Beach Post has been honored with a 2022 Salute to Excellence Award.
In the “Black Snow” series, Post reporter Lulu Ramadan, along with ProPublica engagement reporter Maya Miller, news applications developer Ash Ngu and video reporter Nadia Sussman, showed how regulators allow the sugar industry to burn crops at the expense of communities of color in Florida’s heartland, despite internal research and complaints from residents. For years, residents living amid Florida’s sugar fields have complained about cane burning, a harvesting method that helps produce more than half of America’s cane sugar but chokes Black and Hispanic communities, known as the Glades, with smoke and ash. They call it “black snow.” All the while, politically powerful sugar companies and state regulators have reassured residents that the air is healthy to breathe.
Over 18 months, the Post and ProPublica tested that proposition, producing a first-of-its-kind analysis of pollution linked to cane burning. The reporters interviewed dozens of people living in the Glades and obtained hundreds of public records from environmental and public health agencies. The team also did its own air monitoring, consulting with six experts in air quality and public health from universities across the country and installing sensors at homes in one of the state’s most underserved communities. The readings showed repeated spikes in pollution on days when the state had authorized cane burning. These short-term spikes often reached four times the average pollution levels in the area — enough that experts said they posed health risks.
The investigation found that state regulators depended on data from a single monitor to track air quality across the sugar-growing region, despite telling their federal counterparts that the monitor was unfit to determine whether the air met standards set under the Clean Air Act. And though regulators had done little to address Glades residents’ concerns, they had already banned burning when the wind blew toward the wealthier, whiter communities east of the cane fields.
Another story in the series exposed how Florida ignored its own researchers’ recommendations to study the health impact of cane burning. So the reporters did their own analysis, using eight years of hospitalization data to examine health trends. They found hospital and emergency room visits for breathing problems among Glades patients spiked during cane-burning season.
After publication, U.S. Sugar mounted a public relations campaign in the Glades to discredit ProPublica, which it called an “activist, agenda-driven, online-only website.” The company maintained that burning was safe and could not be stopped without significant economic impact. So Sussman traveled to Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, where São Paulo officials largely phased out burning years ago after residents there voiced concerns similar to those of Floridians today. She made a short documentary explaining how the industry switched to another harvesting method, one that has paid off for companies in terms of profit and for the public in terms of health. Notably, Brazilian officials in government and industry told ProPublica that their solutions were transferable to Florida.
Now the project is reshaping the political debate in Florida, where both political parties have long supported the sugar industry. In December, Democratic state lawmakers introduced legislation to roll back a law that protects farmers from lawsuits over air pollution. And U.S. Rep. Charlie Crist, who served as governor from 2007 to 2011 and is now a contender for the post again, has pledged to push for “a shift away from burning and towards a cleaner harvesting process” if elected governor this year. He called for action in response to reporting by the Post and ProPublica, saying “we cannot continue to turn a blind eye to the air pollution and health hazards this community is experiencing.”
In 2022, academic researchers planned to launch a study of the effects of cane burning in the Glades. The project, funded by a $218,000 grant from NASA, was spurred by the “Black Snow” investigation. It will be the most comprehensive study of its kind in the region.
See a list of all NABJ Salute to Excellence winners.
