Belle Glade, South Bay and Pahokee are tight-knit, predominantly Black and brown communities that endure a grim ritual every sugarcane harvest season — the thick smoke from pre-harvest cane fires drifting across town, stinging eyes, inflaming asthma and coating cars in “black snow.” The negative impacts to our health, quality of life and businesses, and the expense of cleaning up the black snow, are the costs of the sugar industry’s outdated and unnecessary practice of pre-harvest sugar field burning.
