October 29, 2024 • 17 mins
Charity Ryerson investigates human rights and environmental abuse allegations against multinational corporations everyday. But what she and her team found in Central Romana worker camps was like nothing they'd ever seen before. Has the sugar ban changed anything about how Big Sugar operates?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
Central Romana are currently the largest landowner and employer in
the entire Dominican Republic. Corporate leadership has cycled in and
out of various positions within the Dominican government administration, including
Vice president and other major positions, so they're an incredibly
powerful company. There's three main sugar producers in that country,
(00:29):
and they're the largest of the three.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Charity Ryerson is executive director and founder of the Corporate
Accountability Lab in Chicago. The non partisan organization investigates human
rights and environmental abuse allegations against multinational corporations.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
The sugarcane industry came across our desk primarily because there
was such an egregious situation of human rights violation happening
in the Dominican Republic specifically, and so we went down.
We investigated, We visited the bdeges where the workers lived,
we interviewed workers, and we saw with our own eyes
that it was an extraordinary case of human rights abuse
that really needed to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
What Charity and her team found in these worker camps
owned by Central Romana was like nothing she'd ever seen before.
I'm Celeste Hedley and this is the final of three
bonus episodes of Dig Sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
If you just close your eyes and stepped back and
open them and imagine that you were in you're watching
a film about slavery in the fields of the southern
United States, where you would see black workers with rudimentary tools,
doing backbreaking labor for many, many hours a day loading
up sugarcane into the back of a wagon that's then
pulled by oxen. That's what you see. There's nothing that
(02:02):
you can see with your eyes. Sometimes when you look
out at these workers, these brigades working, that distinguishes it
from what it looked like on a plantation in the
south of the United States one hundred years ago. So
it's really a sad and hard situation for these workers.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And they essentially have no choice but to work in
these fields. Many of the cane workers were born in
the Dominican Republic, but they're of Haitian descent. In twenty fifteen,
the Dominican government stripped Dominican born Haitians of their citizenship,
which left many of these workers with no right to
stay in the dr unless they remain on the farm.
(02:42):
They can't leave and work elsewhere in the dr and
they have no ties to anyone in Haiti because they
weren't born there, so they effectively are tied to these
camps owned by Central Romana, where they work, live and
raise their families.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
These are small cement dwellings, many people crammed into one
or two room houses or barracks, whole families living there,
their children grow up there. Their children then become sugar
cane cutters, or otherwise have no right to live in
the community in which they were born. There's no bathrooms.
Most of them don't have kitchens, so to use the
bathroom they have these small, very basic latrines that are
(03:25):
sort of a small tin hut with a cement hole
out back that you share with other residents of your bday.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
These cramped rundown shacks have no running water, so no
kitchens or plumbing. Families fill buckets with water from a
single spigot and cook over open fires. Workers told Charity
that many of them spend six to seven days a
week in the fields cutting sugar cane by hand with machetes.
(03:56):
These inhuman conditions might remind you of our earlier reporting
about the dangerous work and lost wages Florida's sugarcane workers
had to endure.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
There was one worker that we talked to who was
in his seventies, I would say, and he came to
work on these farms in the mid sixties. He was
kidnapped from Haiti during a time when there were kidnapping
forcible trafficking from Haiti in the Dominican Republic. So his
kidnapp from Haiti in the sixties brought to the dr
(04:27):
to work at Central Romana, and to this day he
works at Central Romana. And he pulled up his pant
leg to show us this machete injury that he had
gotten just a week before. And he has nowhere to go,
and he has no pension, He has no money to
retire off of. He just lives paycheck to paycheck and
lives in the bateges like everybody else. So the company
(04:50):
is just using people up and then leaving them with
absolutely nothing and no recourse.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
The exact forced labor abuses the US Customs and Border
Protection investigation found included abusive living and working conditions withholding wages,
abusive vulnerability, isolation, and excessive overtime. And so for the
first time ever, Dominican Sugar was banned from entering the
United States Central Romana naturally was not happy to lose
(05:25):
their lucrative US sugar market. They issued a statement saying
they vehemently disagreed with the ban and said quote, it
does not reflect the facts about the company or the
treatment of our employees end quote. Charity and her team
at the Corporate Accountability Lab offered to help negotiate a remedy.
They met with officials from Central Romana and discussed how
(05:48):
living and working conditions could be improved, but those talks
ultimately went nowhere.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
They did not decide to take the route of a
robust for mediation program and instead have been pursuing a
pretty robust lobbying program, so that rather than going through
CBP's established process for remediation, they're trying to use their
very close connections in US Congress and frankly the Biden
administration to do an end run around this process and
(06:15):
try to have it modified without significant changes on the ground.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Let's say the lobbying doesn't work. Is not having access
to the US market enough of a loss for the
company to compel change.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
They were exporting almost the entirety of their production to
the United States. Losing their market access in the US
is a pretty significant penalty. This isn't like losing a
single customer. This is dramatic. However, because they're so well
connected within the Dominican government, they very quickly rearranged the
sugar quota arrangement with the other two major companies, so
(06:51):
that the other two companies now are using the sugar
quota to export into the United States, and Central Ramana
is selling their sugar domestically. I think it's different to
say we've made some mistakes, we're sorry, and we're going
to fix it, or to sort of gaslight eight thousand
or so workers and all of the many people who
have gone there to witness how egregious these conditions are
(07:12):
and say none of this is true. It never happened.
So Dominican government has been supporting Central Romana in that narrative,
which I think suggests a pretty significant amount of political
power continues.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
That's right, there's no Central Romana sugar rotting in a
warehouse somewhere with all of their government ties in the
dr The company just swapped buyers and they used another
business tactic, a tactic that's a lot more effective when
you make large donations to politicians political pressure as the
(07:46):
US band dragged on Alfi, Van Hul wrote a letter
to an old friend, former Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut,
god now serves as State Department Special Presidential Advisor for
the Americas. In the which was obtained by Mother Jones
and reveal, Alfi fan Hul wrote that he was terribly
upset by the allegations of forced labor and states Chris,
(08:10):
we have been friends for a long time. I am
asking for your help.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And if you see this letter that they sent to
Chris Dodd, it's really striking that they refer to the
close friendship, the log relationship, frankly a kind of touchy
feely letter between them and Chris Dodd. And I think
that that's probably representative of a lot of the communications
that they're having with Congress. But it also in their
lobbying disclosures, which Central Romano directly has spent nearly half
(08:40):
a million dollars in lobbying the Department of Transportation, Customs
and Border Protection, the US Senate House of Representatives, other
federal agencies, but then beyond that, Florida Crystals has spent
another one point two million dollars lobbying and according to disclosures.
It's around trade and sugar sugar exports, w RO remediation,
(09:01):
and so it's pretty clear what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
So regardless of how that turns out in the future,
this is the first time that sugar imports have been
banned because of human rights abuses. How significant is this
even symbolically.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
It's a huge deal. I mean, can you imagine this?
The Dominican Republic has been such a big trading partner
with the United States for sugar for so many years.
The idea that the largest producer would have all of
their imports into the United States blocked based on forced
labor concerns, that is extraordinary. It's an incredible moment.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
It's been nearly two years since the sugar import ban
and Central Romana and the fan Huls still have not
changed the way they do business. Working conditions in the
dr continue to resemble slavery, and fields in South Florida
earn routinely polluting the air with black smoke and ash.
(10:04):
So where does this leave us? Since starting our own investigation,
I can't shop at the grocery store without thinking about
how all those bags of Domino or Florida crystal sugar
got here, and who's paying the price with our wallets
and our health. According to the USDA, Americans consume more
(10:25):
than one hundred pounds of sugar per person every year.
That's roughly thirty four teaspoons of sugar per day, and
our addiction to sugar keeps growing. So I ask, Charity,
what can someone like me or you do.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
When I walk down the aisle in the grocery store
and I see all of the sugar, understanding that it's
labeled in many different ways, but so much of it
is connected to this corporate family, because they're a multi
headed hydra with so many different companies. And even if
it's not just a sugar ale, when I walk down
the chocolate asle and I see Hershees and know that
Hershe's was a major buyer Central Romana sugar, that's not
(11:02):
just in the sugarcists asle, It's everywhere across the grocery store.
And so there's not really a world in which we
could boycott it. We say, consume ethically, certainly by local,
you know, but if you're talking about buying certified products
or relying on corporate representation, we're just surrounded by such nonsense.
By such double speak by companies that it would be
(11:23):
very difficult for even your most well intentioned and educated
consumer to make decisions that would actually address this problem
in a meaningful way. There's no clean hands in this economy,
so it really needs bigger systemic change. Certainly, we could
lobby our legislators to not support a farm bill that
is subsidizing billionaires.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
The Farm Bill government officials say it could be the
largest one yet, a record one point five trillion dollars
in spending over five years. Now. There are incredibly important
programs which make up the bulk of that money, including
access to healthy food for more than forty million Americans.
But the sugar program is in there too, and according
(12:10):
to a report by the Government Accountability Office, it significantly
benefits sugar producers, not the American consumer. The Farm Bill
was last passed in twenty eighteen, and it typically comes
up for reauthorization every five years, but it was extended
from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. Congress is
(12:31):
supposed to take the nearly one thousand page policy up
in September, but many people believe it'll be pushed into
twenty twenty five. It's a very large piece of legislation
that most of us pay very little attention to. But
we can be assured that Big Sugar will spend a
lot of time and money lobbying members on both sides
(12:53):
of the aisle to keep those sugar subsidies in place. Meanwhile,
the world's largest sugar producer, Brazil, has stopped burning its
sugar fields After residents there complained about the polluted air.
The government worked with farmers to phase out the practice. Now,
Brazil harvests its twenty million acres of sugar cane buy machine.
(13:16):
There's no smoke, no ash, no black snow rising from
brazil sugar fields, but US sugar companies are unwilling to
make the switch to green harvesting. We started this series
documenting the year's long lawsuit brought by thousands of migrant
(13:37):
workers in Florida. Jamaican cane cutters like Victor and Selvin
fought for the wages they earned but never received from
the sugar companies. We heard about the dangerous working conditions
and crowded barracks they had to endure. It's happening again
today to Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. We heard
(13:58):
about the van hul brothers journey from Cuba to Florida
as they rebuilt their family sugar fortune and made influential friends.
They were immigrants living the American dream, relying on the
work of immigrants desperate to earn money, money to send
home to their families. Today, the fawn hooles, who play
a major role in the sugar industries of the United
(14:20):
States and the Dominican Republic, are fighting the US ban
on imports of Dominican sugar, while the Haitian workers continue
to harvest sugarcane under inhumane conditions. We heard about the
decades long environmental impact and political influence of the sugar industry.
Even President Nixon knew the perils of challenging the sugar lobby.
(14:42):
We heard about healthcare workers discovering the truth about the
sugar we put into our bodies, and the industry's public
relations machine convincing us that sugar is good for us.
The fight that started with Victor and Selvin has new
faces and an new mission. Journalists, researchers, and human rights
(15:04):
activists are exposing the truth about harvesting and air pollution,
illness and quality of life, and on the front lines
is Glade's resident Keina Phillips, who we met last episode.
She vows to keep fighting until sugar companies stop burning
the fields and then black snow stops falling. Whole around
(15:28):
here is not going green. Everybody is going green. Is
it a cost for them to start green harvesting?
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Probably so. But at the end of the day, is
our life's worth the investment that you're making. We'll be
paying attention as Congress debates the Farm Bill in the
coming months, because Keena is right, people's lives are on
the line. This episode of Big Sugar is produced by
(16:15):
Weekday Fund Productions, Imagine Audio, and Rococo Punch for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions and
Andrea Assoahe and Catherine Fenalosa at Rococo Punch. It's executive
produced by Karra Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner. The
(16:35):
story editor is Emily Foreman. Sound design and mixing by
James Trout. Original music composed by Troy McCubbin at Alloy Tracks.
Additional music by Nicholas Alexander. Special thanks to novel, our
production partner on episodes one through nine, and Alec Wilkinson,
author of the book Big Sugar. Big Sugar is based
(16:56):
on the Vanity Fair article in the Kingdom of Big
Sugar by Marie A.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Brenner
Central Romana are currently the largest landowner and employer in
the entire Dominican Republic. Corporate leadership has cycled in and
out of various positions within the Dominican government administration, including
Vice president and other major positions, so they're an incredibly
powerful company. There's three main sugar producers in that country,
(00:29):
and they're the largest of the three.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Charity Ryerson is executive director and founder of the Corporate
Accountability Lab in Chicago. The non partisan organization investigates human
rights and environmental abuse allegations against multinational corporations.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
The sugarcane industry came across our desk primarily because there
was such an egregious situation of human rights violation happening
in the Dominican Republic specifically, and so we went down.
We investigated, We visited the bdeges where the workers lived,
we interviewed workers, and we saw with our own eyes
that it was an extraordinary case of human rights abuse
that really needed to be addressed.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
What Charity and her team found in these worker camps
owned by Central Romana was like nothing she'd ever seen before.
I'm Celeste Hedley and this is the final of three
bonus episodes of Dig Sugar.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
If you just close your eyes and stepped back and
open them and imagine that you were in you're watching
a film about slavery in the fields of the southern
United States, where you would see black workers with rudimentary tools,
doing backbreaking labor for many, many hours a day loading
up sugarcane into the back of a wagon that's then
pulled by oxen. That's what you see. There's nothing that
(02:02):
you can see with your eyes. Sometimes when you look
out at these workers, these brigades working, that distinguishes it
from what it looked like on a plantation in the
south of the United States one hundred years ago. So
it's really a sad and hard situation for these workers.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
And they essentially have no choice but to work in
these fields. Many of the cane workers were born in
the Dominican Republic, but they're of Haitian descent. In twenty fifteen,
the Dominican government stripped Dominican born Haitians of their citizenship,
which left many of these workers with no right to
stay in the dr unless they remain on the farm.
(02:42):
They can't leave and work elsewhere in the dr and
they have no ties to anyone in Haiti because they
weren't born there, so they effectively are tied to these
camps owned by Central Romana, where they work, live and
raise their families.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
These are small cement dwellings, many people crammed into one
or two room houses or barracks, whole families living there,
their children grow up there. Their children then become sugar
cane cutters, or otherwise have no right to live in
the community in which they were born. There's no bathrooms.
Most of them don't have kitchens, so to use the
bathroom they have these small, very basic latrines that are
(03:25):
sort of a small tin hut with a cement hole
out back that you share with other residents of your bday.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
These cramped rundown shacks have no running water, so no
kitchens or plumbing. Families fill buckets with water from a
single spigot and cook over open fires. Workers told Charity
that many of them spend six to seven days a
week in the fields cutting sugar cane by hand with machetes.
(03:56):
These inhuman conditions might remind you of our earlier reporting
about the dangerous work and lost wages Florida's sugarcane workers
had to endure.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
There was one worker that we talked to who was
in his seventies, I would say, and he came to
work on these farms in the mid sixties. He was
kidnapped from Haiti during a time when there were kidnapping
forcible trafficking from Haiti in the Dominican Republic. So his
kidnapp from Haiti in the sixties brought to the dr
(04:27):
to work at Central Romana, and to this day he
works at Central Romana. And he pulled up his pant
leg to show us this machete injury that he had
gotten just a week before. And he has nowhere to go,
and he has no pension, He has no money to
retire off of. He just lives paycheck to paycheck and
lives in the bateges like everybody else. So the company
(04:50):
is just using people up and then leaving them with
absolutely nothing and no recourse.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
The exact forced labor abuses the US Customs and Border
Protection investigation found included abusive living and working conditions withholding wages,
abusive vulnerability, isolation, and excessive overtime. And so for the
first time ever, Dominican Sugar was banned from entering the
United States Central Romana naturally was not happy to lose
(05:25):
their lucrative US sugar market. They issued a statement saying
they vehemently disagreed with the ban and said quote, it
does not reflect the facts about the company or the
treatment of our employees end quote. Charity and her team
at the Corporate Accountability Lab offered to help negotiate a remedy.
They met with officials from Central Romana and discussed how
(05:48):
living and working conditions could be improved, but those talks
ultimately went nowhere.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
They did not decide to take the route of a
robust for mediation program and instead have been pursuing a
pretty robust lobbying program, so that rather than going through
CBP's established process for remediation, they're trying to use their
very close connections in US Congress and frankly the Biden
administration to do an end run around this process and
(06:15):
try to have it modified without significant changes on the ground.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Let's say the lobbying doesn't work. Is not having access
to the US market enough of a loss for the
company to compel change.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
They were exporting almost the entirety of their production to
the United States. Losing their market access in the US
is a pretty significant penalty. This isn't like losing a
single customer. This is dramatic. However, because they're so well
connected within the Dominican government, they very quickly rearranged the
sugar quota arrangement with the other two major companies, so
(06:51):
that the other two companies now are using the sugar
quota to export into the United States, and Central Ramana
is selling their sugar domestically. I think it's different to
say we've made some mistakes, we're sorry, and we're going
to fix it, or to sort of gaslight eight thousand
or so workers and all of the many people who
have gone there to witness how egregious these conditions are
(07:12):
and say none of this is true. It never happened.
So Dominican government has been supporting Central Romana in that narrative,
which I think suggests a pretty significant amount of political
power continues.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
That's right, there's no Central Romana sugar rotting in a
warehouse somewhere with all of their government ties in the
dr The company just swapped buyers and they used another
business tactic, a tactic that's a lot more effective when
you make large donations to politicians political pressure as the
(07:46):
US band dragged on Alfi, Van Hul wrote a letter
to an old friend, former Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut,
god now serves as State Department Special Presidential Advisor for
the Americas. In the which was obtained by Mother Jones
and reveal, Alfi fan Hul wrote that he was terribly
upset by the allegations of forced labor and states Chris,
(08:10):
we have been friends for a long time. I am
asking for your help.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
And if you see this letter that they sent to
Chris Dodd, it's really striking that they refer to the
close friendship, the log relationship, frankly a kind of touchy
feely letter between them and Chris Dodd. And I think
that that's probably representative of a lot of the communications
that they're having with Congress. But it also in their
lobbying disclosures, which Central Romano directly has spent nearly half
(08:40):
a million dollars in lobbying the Department of Transportation, Customs
and Border Protection, the US Senate House of Representatives, other
federal agencies, but then beyond that, Florida Crystals has spent
another one point two million dollars lobbying and according to disclosures.
It's around trade and sugar sugar exports, w RO remediation,
(09:01):
and so it's pretty clear what they're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
So regardless of how that turns out in the future,
this is the first time that sugar imports have been
banned because of human rights abuses. How significant is this
even symbolically.
Speaker 1 (09:19):
It's a huge deal. I mean, can you imagine this?
The Dominican Republic has been such a big trading partner
with the United States for sugar for so many years.
The idea that the largest producer would have all of
their imports into the United States blocked based on forced
labor concerns, that is extraordinary. It's an incredible moment.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
It's been nearly two years since the sugar import ban
and Central Romana and the fan Huls still have not
changed the way they do business. Working conditions in the
dr continue to resemble slavery, and fields in South Florida
earn routinely polluting the air with black smoke and ash.
(10:04):
So where does this leave us? Since starting our own investigation,
I can't shop at the grocery store without thinking about
how all those bags of Domino or Florida crystal sugar
got here, and who's paying the price with our wallets
and our health. According to the USDA, Americans consume more
(10:25):
than one hundred pounds of sugar per person every year.
That's roughly thirty four teaspoons of sugar per day, and
our addiction to sugar keeps growing. So I ask, Charity,
what can someone like me or you do.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
When I walk down the aisle in the grocery store
and I see all of the sugar, understanding that it's
labeled in many different ways, but so much of it
is connected to this corporate family, because they're a multi
headed hydra with so many different companies. And even if
it's not just a sugar ale, when I walk down
the chocolate asle and I see Hershees and know that
Hershe's was a major buyer Central Romana sugar, that's not
(11:02):
just in the sugarcists asle, It's everywhere across the grocery store.
And so there's not really a world in which we
could boycott it. We say, consume ethically, certainly by local,
you know, but if you're talking about buying certified products
or relying on corporate representation, we're just surrounded by such nonsense.
By such double speak by companies that it would be
(11:23):
very difficult for even your most well intentioned and educated
consumer to make decisions that would actually address this problem
in a meaningful way. There's no clean hands in this economy,
so it really needs bigger systemic change. Certainly, we could
lobby our legislators to not support a farm bill that
is subsidizing billionaires.
Speaker 2 (11:48):
The Farm Bill government officials say it could be the
largest one yet, a record one point five trillion dollars
in spending over five years. Now. There are incredibly important
programs which make up the bulk of that money, including
access to healthy food for more than forty million Americans.
But the sugar program is in there too, and according
(12:10):
to a report by the Government Accountability Office, it significantly
benefits sugar producers, not the American consumer. The Farm Bill
was last passed in twenty eighteen, and it typically comes
up for reauthorization every five years, but it was extended
from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty four. Congress is
(12:31):
supposed to take the nearly one thousand page policy up
in September, but many people believe it'll be pushed into
twenty twenty five. It's a very large piece of legislation
that most of us pay very little attention to. But
we can be assured that Big Sugar will spend a
lot of time and money lobbying members on both sides
(12:53):
of the aisle to keep those sugar subsidies in place. Meanwhile,
the world's largest sugar producer, Brazil, has stopped burning its
sugar fields After residents there complained about the polluted air.
The government worked with farmers to phase out the practice. Now,
Brazil harvests its twenty million acres of sugar cane buy machine.
(13:16):
There's no smoke, no ash, no black snow rising from
brazil sugar fields, but US sugar companies are unwilling to
make the switch to green harvesting. We started this series
documenting the year's long lawsuit brought by thousands of migrant
(13:37):
workers in Florida. Jamaican cane cutters like Victor and Selvin
fought for the wages they earned but never received from
the sugar companies. We heard about the dangerous working conditions
and crowded barracks they had to endure. It's happening again
today to Haitian workers in the Dominican Republic. We heard
(13:58):
about the van hul brothers journey from Cuba to Florida
as they rebuilt their family sugar fortune and made influential friends.
They were immigrants living the American dream, relying on the
work of immigrants desperate to earn money, money to send
home to their families. Today, the fawn hooles, who play
a major role in the sugar industries of the United
(14:20):
States and the Dominican Republic, are fighting the US ban
on imports of Dominican sugar, while the Haitian workers continue
to harvest sugarcane under inhumane conditions. We heard about the
decades long environmental impact and political influence of the sugar industry.
Even President Nixon knew the perils of challenging the sugar lobby.
(14:42):
We heard about healthcare workers discovering the truth about the
sugar we put into our bodies, and the industry's public
relations machine convincing us that sugar is good for us.
The fight that started with Victor and Selvin has new
faces and an new mission. Journalists, researchers, and human rights
(15:04):
activists are exposing the truth about harvesting and air pollution,
illness and quality of life, and on the front lines
is Glade's resident Keina Phillips, who we met last episode.
She vows to keep fighting until sugar companies stop burning
the fields and then black snow stops falling. Whole around
(15:28):
here is not going green. Everybody is going green. Is
it a cost for them to start green harvesting?
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Probably so. But at the end of the day, is
our life's worth the investment that you're making. We'll be
paying attention as Congress debates the Farm Bill in the
coming months, because Keena is right, people's lives are on
the line. This episode of Big Sugar is produced by
(16:15):
Weekday Fund Productions, Imagine Audio, and Rococo Punch for iHeartMedia.
The series is hosted by me Celeste Hedley. Big Sugar
is produced by Jeff Eisenman at Weekday Fund Productions and
Andrea Assoahe and Catherine Fenalosa at Rococo Punch. It's executive
produced by Karra Welker, Nathan Kloke, and Marie Brenner. The
(16:35):
story editor is Emily Foreman. Sound design and mixing by
James Trout. Original music composed by Troy McCubbin at Alloy Tracks.
Additional music by Nicholas Alexander. Special thanks to novel, our
production partner on episodes one through nine, and Alec Wilkinson,
author of the book Big Sugar. Big Sugar is based
(16:56):
on the Vanity Fair article in the Kingdom of Big
Sugar by Marie A.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Brenner
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Ridiculous History
History is beautiful, brutal and, often, ridiculous. Join Ben Bowlin and Noel Brown as they dive into some of the weirdest stories from across the span of human civilization in Ridiculous History, a podcast by iHeartRadio.