Sugar Beet Growers Fight For Livelihood
March 16, 2005
Kevin Diaz, Star Tribune

WASHINGTON, D.C. - It's not every day that a guy used to getting dirt under his fingernails scores back-to-back meetings with members of Congress from morning until the sun sets over the Capitol Dome. But that's how it was for Minnesota sugar beet farmer Mike Hasbargen one day earlier this month. And quite frankly, his necktie was killing him.

"We're out of our comfort zone to begin with," said the 59-year-old Breckenridge farmer. "Then we come in with our ties on, and we're getting choked to death."

Such are the occupational hazards of sugar politics in Washington. At stake is the farm economy of Minnesota's Red River Valley, a region that feels it is fighting for its economic life against a Central American trade agreement coming up soon for ratification by Congress.

Hasbargen is part of an unusual coalition of "red America" farmers and "blue America" labor, human rights and environmental activists joining forces against the Bush administration's free-trade agenda. For some in this coalition, the fight is about globalization and Third World poverty, labor rules and child labor in El Salvador.

For pro-business groups that support the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), it's about economic development and new markets.

They say it would open up billions of dollars in new U.S. sales to six nations -- El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic -- that have made big strides toward democracy and open markets in recent years.

For Hasbargen and more than 40 other Red River farmers who have come to Washington in the last two weeks, it's about the survival of an industry that says it generates more than 30,000 jobs and $1.7 billion in economic activity in Minnesota.

Their argument is quite direct: CAFTA will open our nation's borders to more imported sugar and put a teetering U.S. sugar industry out of business.

Minnesota is the nation's largest sugar producing region, putting it at the center of the debate over sugar imports, which could increase by nearly 50 percent under the treaty.

Under CAFTA, "most of the towns here are just going to dry up and blow away," said Steve Williams, a Fisher, Minn., sugar beet farmer who spent the last week lobbying in Washington.

A vote, coming as soon as April or May, is expected to be close.

'Our livelihoods'

Williams, a third-generation farmer, says the folks back home -- from the seed dealers in town to the coffee shop owners and the workers at the American Crystal Sugar mills -- all depend on the message he is carrying to as many people in Washington as he can find.

"We're going to do our best to fight it," said Williams, 54, sitting in a Capitol Hill restaurant frequented by congressional leaders. "We're fighting for our very livelihoods."

Joining him at a table of Minnesota farmers is Kelly Erickson, similarly decked in a suit and tie. Back home in Hallock, Minn., Erickson would be hauling grain and working on machinery this time of year. While he's in Washington, he's had to hire out that work.

Erickson, 47, has three kids and 3,500 acres, nearly a quarter of which is in sugar beets. It's the same land his great-grandfather opened up, starting a continuous chain of Erickson farmers.

"We'd like to continue that," said Erickson, secretary of the Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association, which includes the American Crystal Sugar Company.

American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative of 3,000 members, is the state's perennial top contributor to Washington officeholders. Through political action committees, members, owners and employees, the company put $771,464 into federal campaign coffers in the last two years -- more than any of the state's largest corporations.

Sugar, long protected by government import quotas, is big business in Breckenridge, Moorhead and East Grand Forks. After health care, it's the area's biggest employer. The mill jobs are union and pay better-than-average wages in northwestern Minnesota.

But the industry's biggest asset in Washington is the ability to mobilize grass-roots support among farmers like David Kragnes, who serves as a director for American Crystal Sugar.

"Real farmers taking the time to be in Washington and meet with congressmen sends a powerful statement," said Kragnes, who has 495 acres of sugar beets in Felton, Minn., on the same land his great-grandfather bought from the railroad. "We're not hiring somebody to do this. Spring is coming, and we have things to do." Like Hasbargen, Kragnes admits to feeling a little out of his element in Washington.

"There's nothing to put a wrench to or grease up here," he said. "Though almost all of the cabs need some maintenance."

'Paradigm shift'

For the farmers-turned-lobbyists, the greatest challenge is being heard through the din of other congressional supplicants, almost all of them professionals with slick suits and slicker messages.

"We're not born communicators. That's not what got us to the dance," Hasbargen said. "It's incredibly stressful to make cold calls" on lawmakers, Hasbargen said. "Being a farm boy, it's a paradigm shift, to say the least."

Hasbargen's lobbying partner is Brent Davison, a 54-year-old ex-schoolteacher who came back and joined his brother on the family farm near Breckenridge.

Between them, Hasbargen and Davison, who serve on the Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative board, had about 30 appointments with members of Congress or their staffs over a span of four days. They focused mainly on the undecideds, those who haven't laid out a clear position for or against the treaty. No point in preaching to the choir.

But while they heard a lot of lip service to the problems of farmers, they got few clear commitments to vote against CAFTA.

"You don't see a lot of signed pledges here," Hasbargen said. "That's not the way the game is played."

Close call

Minnesota's congressional delegation is divided on the issue. The Democrats, particularly western Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, are uniformly opposed to CAFTA. But some of the Republicans are torn between their free-trade beliefs and the sensitivities of the state's sugar beet farmers.

"I am a free trader and want to support CAFTA," said Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn. "But I also need to see progress made in addressing the serious concerns I have on the issue of sugar."

The problem for Coleman and others is that while they'd like to safeguard the sugar industry, Congress doesn't get to amend the treaty. It must take it or leave it as a whole.

So far, only Reps. Jim Ramstad and John Kline have come out unequivocally in favor of the treaty. The other state Republicans are on the fence.

Activists on both sides of the CAFTA battle say the vote will be close. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, a South Dakota native and one of the treaty's point men in Congress, said, "It would be a terrible blunder to kick Central America back down the ladder of democracy."

But Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., one of CAFTA's leading opponents, said the treaty has run into bipartisan worries in Congress about higher trade deficits and U.S. job losses -- including in Minnesota's sugar industry. It is that uneasiness, he says, that has kept Republican leaders from bringing the treaty up until now. Mainstream farm groups, such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, have gotten behind the treaty, which they say is consistent with farmers' interest in expanding overseas markets.

But some Minnesota farm groups remain opposed or quiet on the issue, out of deference to the state's beet farmers.

Is the sky falling?

CAFTA backers in the sweetener, soft drink and candy industries say current import quotas keep prices artificially high. They also note that the treaty would increase Central American sugar imports by about 150,000 metric tons, less than 2 percent of the total U.S. production of 8.5 million tons -- hardly a sky-is-falling scenario.

In sugar beet country, however, that's seen as 150,000 metric tons on top of what is already a glut market with plunging prices. Whatever CAFTA's benefits to other sectors of the U.S. economy, beet farmers say it's not going to help the Red River Valley.

Which is what got Hasbargen out of his overalls and seed cap and on a plane to Washington. "It seems like agriculture is always the whipping boy in all these trade agreements," he said. "That's just the way it is."

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