Community Profile: Bowling for Sugar

All eyes will be on New Orleans this New Year's Day as the University of Cincinnati Bearcats defend their perfect season against the Florida Gators in the Sugar Bowl.

And while their beloved LSU Tigers will be nearly 650 miles away in Orlando, most people from south Louisiana will still tune in to support the Sugar Bowl and the crop it represents.

Sugar and Louisiana are as intertwined as any expect maybe Idaho potatoes.

New Orleans was the first site in North America where the crop was planted and the first Sugar Bowl was played in a converted sugar field.

Coffee shops throughout the region echo with the tales of great-grandfathers working in dew-glistened cane fields back in the day, while college-age women each year wage a fierce battle for the privilege of wearing the Sugar Queen crown.

Sugar may not be the powerhouse industry in Louisiana it was 100 or 200 years ago, but it still employs 27,000 Louisianans, supports 550 farm families, and contributes more than $1.7 billion a year to the local economy.

Amazingly there are some who have sought to bring this proud tradition to an abrupt end, even as the state's farmers struggled to rebuild after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

For years, large food manufacturers have lobbied Congress to gut the domestic farm policies Louisiana's growers depend on in favor of foreign sugar production.

If that were to happen, Jim Simon, general manager of the trade group representing the state's sugar industry, says the sugar business would wilt. Small southern towns in rural Louisiana like Raceland, St. Martinville and Thibodeaux would literally become ghost towns overnight.

The result, he explains, would be an increase in unemployment, a decrease in tax dollars, and a ripple effect that would reverberate through the banking, manufacturing, and shipping industries.

Some cynics might ask, "Why don't you just grow something else?"

Because of the area's subtropical climate and soil conditions, it's not suited for anything but sugar.

As Jessie Breaux, a third-generation cane farmer from Franklin put it: "Do away with our current sugar policy and the only thing we'll grow in south Louisiana is our unemployment rate."

That's why the state's sugar farmers have been fierce supporters of the Sugar Bowl and anything else that can help folks from other parts of the country understand the magical connection Louisianans have with cane.

Not to mention, the Unemployment Bowl hardly sounds like a place where college football teams would like to play.