Florida politicians may give Big Sugar legal power to go after activists and silence critics
Lawmakers in Tallahassee are quietly working on a measure that would give the sugar industry more ammunition to threaten Everglades advocates, news outlets and others with defamation lawsuits.
This is Seeking Rents, a newsletter and podcast devoted to producing original journalism — and lifting up the work of others — about Florida politics, with an emphasis on the ways that big businesses and other special interests influence public policy in the state. Seeking Rents is produced by veteran investigative journalist Jason Garcia, and it is free to all. But please consider a voluntary paid subscription, if you can afford one, to help support our work. And check out our video channel, too.
Florida lawmakers may soon give the state’s powerful sugar industry the legal leverage to sue its critics into silence.
A provision buried deep inside a “farm bill” that has begun moving through the Florida Legislature would make it easier for companies like U.S. Sugar Corp. and Florida Crystals Corp. to wage defamation lawsuits against environmental groups, news outlets, and others who criticize the companies over issues like Everglades restoration and air pollution.
It would do so by expanding a niche law initially passed in the mid-nineties at the behest of agribusiness lobbyists — the same kind of law that the beef industry once tried to use to sue Oprah Winfrey after the talk show host aired a segment about mad cow disease.
Supporters are so far saying little publicly about why they want to expand Florida’s food libel law, which is also often called a “veggie libel law” and which currently only covers defamation claims related to perishable food products — products like fresh fruits, vegetables and meats that spoil quickly and are therefore vulnerable to misinformation that might spark a public scare.
The idea has been tucked near the back of a wide-ranging bill proposed by Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, who has branded the overall package as “the Florida farm bill.” But Simpson, a Republican who may run for governor, has omitted any mention of the food libel provision from press releases and social-media graphics promoting the legislation, which has been filed in the Legislature as Senate Bill 290 and House Bill 433.
And state Sen. Keith Truenow, a Republican from central Florida who is sponsoring the legislation in the Senate, never explained the proposal when he presented the farm bill for its first public hearing in Tallahassee earlier this month.
But a reporter asked Truenow about it after the hearing — and the the lawmaker said his goal is ensure that sugar growers can use Florida’s food libel law, too.
“There are some things that we produce in the state of Florida that aren’t perishable,” Truenow told the News Service of Florida. “We want to include them, like sugar or some other products.”
An apple scare leads to lobbying by Big Ag
Florida is one of 13 states with a food libel law on the books — and all of them can be traced back a February 1989 episode of 60 Minutes.
That broadcast included a story about the health risks to children associated with a chemical known as “Alar” used by the commercial apple industry to grow fruits faster and with more appealing color. Growers in Washington state, the nation’s leading producer of apples, responded by suing CBS, alleging that the broadcast triggered a nationwide panic that cost the industry more than $250 million in lost sales.
The lawsuit failed, in part because the apple industry could not prove that CBS had actually broadcast a false statement — which is one of the elements that plaintiffs must prove in order to win a traditional defamation suit.
But the incident also prompted farm industry lobbyists to fan out in state capitols around the country pushing bills that would lower the bar for future defamation suits.
For instance, under Florida’s food libel law, an agricultural company that claims to have suffered losses due to “disparagement” by someone like a news outlet or an advocacy group does not have to prove that anyone made a false statement.
Instead, they only have to demonstrate that someone disseminated “information which is not based on reliable scientific facts and reliable, scientific data” — a much looser category that could include anything from a popular theory that lacks much substance to a scientific hypothesis that has been tested but not yet universally accepted as true.
That’s not all.
In defamation cases involving matters of public interest — like food safety — the single biggest barrier to winning a claim is something known as the “actual malice” standard. It’s not enough for a plaintiff to prove that a defendant made a false statement; the plaintiff must also prove that defendant knew the statement was false when they made it or that the defendant acted with reckless disregard for the truth.
Food libel laws lower that hurdle, too. Florida’s merely requires that an agricultural company suing for defamation show that their target spread information that they “should have known” was false.
Free-speech advocates have argued for years that food libel laws are protectionist favors for agricultural corporations that stifle public debates about issues like nutrition, food safety and public health.
The industry has successfully wielded the laws in the past. Oprah Winfrey ultimately prevailed in the defamation claim brought by the Texas beef industry — but only after spending an estimated $500,000 to $1 million on defense lawyers. And in 2017, the Walt Disney Co. opted to pay a $177 million settlement rather than risk litigating a lawsuit prompted by an ABC News report about “pink slime” in ground beef that was brought under a food libel law in South Dakota.
But food libel laws are, at least, relatively narrow. Florida’s law — which hasn’t been touched by the Legislature in 30 years — only applies in cases where someone has allegedly spread false information claiming that some kind of perishable food product is unsafe for human consumption.
The lawmakers and lobbyists who pushed for the law claimed at the time that they were just trying to protect Florida’s iconic citrus industry and other potentially vulnerable growers of fast-spoiling produce from a scare like the one that had hurt Washington state’s apple growers.
“If you remember back to Alar, that’s really what it’s all about,” a spokesperson for the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association told the Tampa Bay Times in 1994.
Beyond apples and oranges
But the new farm bill would expand Florida’s food libel law well beyond apples and oranges. It would do so in two important ways.
First, the legislation would allow agricultural companies to pursue lawsuits under the easier defamation standards against people or organizations who criticize the safety of non-perishable foods — such as sugar.
Second, it would enable defamation claims against people or organizations who criticize the safety of “any agricultural practices” used in food production — like, for example, the sugar industry’s long-controversial practice of setting pre-harvest fires in sugarcane fields that produce a toxic soot known as “black snow.”
The legislation would even increase the potential payout an agricultural company could win in a food libel suit — thereby putting more pressure on defendants to settle claims rather than fight them — by allowing judges to make defendants pay the company’s attorney fees and legal costs.
The changes wouldn’t solely apply to the sugar industry — meaning the impacts could reverberate far beyond south Florida and the Everglades.
Senate Bill 290 and House Bill 433 would lead to greater legal exposure for any activists or organizations who publicly criticize industrial agriculture. And it could make news organizations more hesitant to produce stories about issues like pesticides and genetically modified foods, because of the heightened legal risk.
Because supporters have said so little about the proposal in public, it’s not clear what — if any — public-policy rationale they have for expanding Florida’s food libel law to non-perishable foods and all farming practices. Representatives for Simpson and Truenow did not respond to requests for comment. Rep. Danny Alvarez, a Tampa-area Republican sponsoring the farm bill in the state House, could not be reached for comment.
But whatever their rationale, the idea appears to have come directly from Simpson, a longtime Florida politician who previously served as president of the state Senate.
Emails obtained by Seeking Rents through a public-records request show that the food libel language was inserted into the farm bill after the bulk of the legislation had already been submitted to Legislature. That suggests that it’s not some issue that simply bubbled up from Department of Agriculture and Consumers Affairs staff.
In that respect, it’s reminiscent of a measure that Simpson had added into another farm bill that passed during the Florida Legislature’s 2024 session. That provision eliminated all local “EV readiness” ordinances, which had been adopted in a number of cities and counties around Florida and had required commercial developers to pre-wire a few spaces in new parking lots for future electric vehicle charging stations.
Records obtained by Seeking Rents later revealed that Publix Super Markets was quietly lobbying for the measure.
Simpson has worked closely with the sugar industry in the past. In 2021, for instance, when he was reaching the peak of his power in the Legislature, Simpson pushed a bill through Tallahassee that immunized sugar growers against lawsuits over alleged public health impacts from cane-field burning.
A year later, as Senate president, Simpson tired to pass another bill intended to protect the sugar industry’s claim to water stored in Lake Okeechobee. Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed that legislation.
The state’s two biggest sugar companies — U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals — are among the largest corporate contributors in Florida politics, and Simpson has long been one of their favorite people in Tallahassee. Records show that Simpson has taken at least $650,000 from the two companies just over the past two years, via various political committees he controls.
Representatives for U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals did not respond to requests for comment.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how long it has been since the Legislature made changes to the state’s food libel law. The statute hasn’t been touched in 30 years.
Desantis is like Trump and has his hands in everything!
Big Sugar , FPL, Publix etc!!
This state is a travesty.