The program has purchased some lands north of the Everglades. Additional funding would speed up the purchase of properties or environmental easements. Within months of coming to the Senate in 1977, Lugar backed a successful effort to limit federal subsidy payments to sugar growers. The federal sugar program creates a price for U.S. sugar that is substantially higher than the world market price by restricting imports of foreign sugar and making loan payments to farmers for each pound of sugar produced. Those loans are 18 cents per pound for cane sugar and 22.9 cents per pound for beet sugar.
Farmers have nine months to pay back the loans.
During that period they usually sell the sugar for about the loan price, while the world market price is about six cents per pound.