To the editor:

I was born and raised in Miami 69 years ago. While growing up, I fished Lake Okeechobee, snorkeled the flats around a barge in “Stiltsville” in Key Biscayne and vacationed in the Keys with my family. I have seen firsthand the effects of Big Sugar on the degradation of the area south of Lake O – and now I see it as a homeowner living on a saltwater canal in Cape Coral.

The quickest and most powerful thing that could be done to start a return to cleansing the ecosystem would be to eliminate completely the sugar subsidies. Everglades Agricultural Area land prices would plummet and the fields would return to the marshy muck land that it used to be, allowing it to be bought up at reasonable prices for conservation and mitigation purposes.

In this case, eminent domain would be a useful tool. This might not be a politically easy solution, but it could be implemented very quickly at no cost to the taxpayers. The money saved on subsidies could be used to buy the conservation land. As an added benefit, those American companies that had to move out of the U.S. to avoid paying almost three times the going world price for sugar would return to the U.S. – employing more Americans.

This is a no-brainer idea and would not take decades to accomplish. Let the markets work, free of restrictions and the unfair advantage for those who are lining the pockets of the political class, both Democrat and Republican.

Bonnie Zink

Cape Coral