Category: Letters and Submissions

The DCA takes part in the phosphate mining process – reviewing all county comp plan amendment proposals and allowing the public their opportunity to comment….

Community Affairs Secretary: There Goes the Scapegoat
http://www.theledger.com/article/20101209/EDIT01/12095006/1036?p=all&tc=pgall
Published: Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, December 8, 2010 at 12:28 a.m.
( page all of 2 )
They won’t have Tom Pelham to kick around anymore. The respected secretary of the Florida Department of Community Affairs has resigned.
It is Florida’s loss, because Pelham has not only been an environmental and growth-management visionary, he has proved to be an adept-and-willing compromiser over the years, especially with the state’s insatiable growth-and-development machine.
It is clear Pelham had no future under incoming Gov. Rick Scott — and maybe would not have had one even if Scott hadn’t been elected, given the Legislature’s disdain for the DCA and Pelham. Nonetheless, Scott was elected and during the election the governor-elect branded the DCA a “jobs killer” for its role in monitoring compliance with the state’s Growth Management Act.
It was a bogus charge, of course, aimed solely at trying to provide the teetering development sector with someone to blame for its greed and lack of restraint. There is very little evidence to suggest that overregulation has slowed down Florida’s growth machine.
The DCA has stopped, or scaled down, some developments that city and county governments approved. While that was happening, hundreds of thousands of new homes and retail spaces were created. It’s the economy — not The DCA — that left them empty.
CLASS ACT TO THE END
To his credit, Pelham has not been shy about defending his department against relentless criticism from Scott and other politicians. In fact, Pelham has been an activist DCA secretary, getting personally involved in those cases he thought were important to Florida’s long-term growth management. In September 2007, Pelham came to Lakeland to hear the concerns of citizens about CSX Transportation’s plan to run more — and longer — freight trains through downtown. He always conducted himself with class and conviction.
Even in the end.
“I think it’s extraordinarily unfair … to give us the responsibility to enforce the laws written by the Legislature and then point the finger of blame at us when we do what we’re charged under the law to do,” Pelham said recently. “It’s very discouraging to public servants, who are given a mission and responsibility to enforce laws enacted by others, to be constantly bashed for doing their job.”
Pelham will leave behind a department under siege. Lawmakers have relentlessly chipped away at Florida’s landmark Growth Management Act. And it is likely that the DCA will be abolished outright, all but ending Florida’s three-decade-long attempt to more wisely manage land use and development.
What will the politicians do for a scapegoat after Pelham and the DCA are gone

By Steve Huettel and Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writers
In Print: Sunday, November 21, 2010
Read article here

FORT MEADE — After a hitch in the Navy and work handling psychiatric patients in lockdown, Billy Griffis held a prized job in this corner of rural Central Florida. • Mosaic Fertilizer paid him $42,000 last year as “wrencher” laying big pipes and fixing pumps at its South Fort Meade phosphate mine. Griffis, 35, didn’t worry about job security. Fertilizer prices soared in recent months, and the world’s largest phosphate fertilizer producer hadn’t laid off a worker during the mine’s 15-year history. • That changed in September. After the Sierra Club and two Florida environmental groups won a federal court ruling to stop work on new section of the mine, Mosaic warned that hundreds of jobs were at risk, then cut 60. The company blamed the Sierra Club. Environmentalists shot back that Mosaic was playing hard-ball to sway public opinion. • The two sides worked out a deal that will bring all the employees back for a while. But neither is ready to quit. Too much is at stake.
Mosaic says it could run short of Florida phosphate without the Fort Meade expansion. Workers worry they’ll be back out of work in a drum-tight job market if the environmental groups win in court. Environmentalists hope a rare court victory will force mining regulators to get tougher with the state’s powerful phosphate business.
• • •
The groups sued the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on June 30, challenging a permit it gave Mosaic to destroy 500 acres of wetlands in an extension of the mine into Hardee County. The next day, U.S. District Judge Henry Lee Adams Jr. ordered a temporary ban on mining wetlands on the 10,855-acre site.
Within days, Mosaic said it would be forced to close the mine and notified 221 workers they faced layoffs in 60 days unless the judge lifted the order. Instead, Adams indefinitely continued the ban, saying the company could still mine upland areas for as long as two years.
Mosaic called it impractical to navigate massive draglines around pockets of wetlands and still mine enough phosphate to make economic sense. But laidoff workers began returning last week, after the agreement with environmentalists to let Mosaic dig 200 acres that had been prepared for mining before the lawsuit.
That gives employees four months of work while the battle grinds through the courts. What happens next lies in the hands of a federal appeals court in Atlanta.
• • •
Environmentalists say mining those wetlands at South Fort Meade will cause more damage than it’s worth. They contend it will lower the level of the already-drained Peace River and the underground aquifer, affecting the local water supply.
Also, destroying wetlands that filter pollutants from stormwater runoff could foul the river that empties 100 miles south into Charlotte Harbor, they say. The river is vital to maintaining the harbor’s delicate salinity that hosts endangered species as well as thriving commercial and recreational fishing.
Mosaic is counting on the South Fort Meade mine expansion to produce 30 percent of the rock that its Florida plants process into diammonium phosphate fertilizer, known as DAP. Without the new mine, Mosaic might have to import rock from Morocco or Peru at a higher cost to keep its fertilizer plants running at full capacity.
Any decline in production at Mosaic, which employs 3,000 in Florida, would ripple through contractors and vendors: welders, equipment mechanics, suppliers of bulk chemicals such as liquid ammonia.
Phosphate mining in Central Florida made Tampa a port city in the 1880s and still plays a big role supporting the maritime business.
The phosphate and fertilizer industry generated one-third of the 38 million tons of cargo that moved through the port last year. It supports more than 67,000 jobs in the region, reported a 2006 study commissioned by the Tampa Port Authority.
“It’s a singular industry,” says port director Richard Wainio. “Florida doesn’t have a lot of big industries, and this is at or near the top of the pile as far as economic benefit for the state.”
Judge Adams’ ruling, believed to be the first court order to stop a Florida mining operation, delighted environmentalists like Dennis Mader of the Protect the Peace River, a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
“For years and years, the phosphate industry has ridden along on the short-term economic benefits in the form of jobs, business at the Port of Tampa and contractors,” said Mader, a resident of Hardee County. “Everybody’s excused the environmental damage that’s endemic in their method of operation.”
U.S. Rep. Adam Putnam, the Bartow Republican elected Nov. 2 as Florida’s agriculture commissioner, on the other hand, contends that environmentalists are out to kill the golden goose.
“If you’re serious about putting Florida back to work, why in the world would you eliminate one of its largest employers?” he told the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club in September.
• • •
It’s not unusual to find families with two or three generations of men who have worked the mines in the vast rural landscape where Polk, Hardee, Hillsborough and Manatee counties come together. They might have played for or against South Fort Meade High School’s football team, the Fighting Miners.
Citrus and cattle dominate the local economy outside mining. Without a college degree, it’s tough even to find work that pays a little over minimum wage, says Griffis, who returned to his job at the South Fort Meade mine Monday.
Unemployment in his home county of Hardee hit 14.8 percent in September, tied with Hernando for the fourth-highest rate among Florida’s 72 counties. While unemployed, Griffis applied for jobs with the city of Wauchula, the county seat and the local McDonald’s. None was hiring.
Clay Farris hoped to be back at work as a Mosaic conveyor operator this week or next. On unemployment since September, he has burned through $5,000 in savings and stopped making $1,300 mortgage payments on his house in Frostproof.
The lawsuit has sparked friction within families. Farris, 32, was borrowing his brother-in-law’s truck but something on the bumper stopped him in his tracks: a Sierra Club sticker.
“That got ripped off plenty quick,” he says. His brother-in-law, a beekeeper, dropped his membership.
Last week, Mosaic announced plans to launch a new business near Fort Meade. The company will build a luxury golf resort on 2,000 acres of restored mine land. Building the golf course, clubhouse and guest villas at Streamsong Resort will employ hundreds of construction workers, Mosaic says. A hospitality management company will employ at least 200 people by the opening, scheduled for fall 2013.
“Without Mosaic’s help,” Griffis says, “Hardee County would turn into a ghost town.”
• • •
Formed by a 2004 merger between IMC-Global and Cargill, Mosaic first applied for the federal permit for the South Fort Meade mine expansion four years ago, after three years of reviews by local and state agencies gave it a green light.
The Corps of Engineers at last approved a permit that allowed Mosaic to souffle more than 500 acres of wetlands or open water. To make up for the environmental damage, the corps required Mosaic to create about 480 acres of new wetlands — something scientists say is often difficult, if not impossible.
The corps’ own rules require looking for less environmentally damaging alternatives when a project does not have to be built in wetlands. If the agency relies on the applicant to do that analysis, then the corps must double-check the work.
But according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mosaic and the corps failed to meet their responsibilities. For example, the EPA said, Mosaic should have considered a smaller mine that wouldn’t destroy so many wetlands. And the corps didn’t independently verify the company’s findings.
The EPA declined to use its seldom-invoked power to veto the permit. But the agency’s objections to the corps helped persuade Judge Adams to block further mining while the corps must start over on a crucial part of the Mosaic permit application.
Environmental and civic groups, alarmed by the phosphate industry’s water use and waste products, have been calling for a decade for the corps to launch a regionwide study of the environmental impact of mining. Instead, the corps has looked only at each permit application on its own.
But the suit over Mosaic’s permit contended that past mining has contributed to tremendous environmental degradation in Central Florida. It cited the corps’ own findings that phosphate mining had led to the loss of 343 miles of streams and 136,000 acres of wetlands in the Peace River region, as well as a decline in the Floridan Aquifer of up to 50 feet within the Peace River watershed.
After Adams’ ruling, the corps finally agreed in August to spend about 18 months on a regional study of phosphate mining’s impact on the environment. The reason: In addition to the South Fort Meade mine, the corps has pending wetland destruction permit applications for 11 more new mines, which it says “may result in significant cumulative environmental impacts in the future.”
Despite the contentions of Putnam and other pro-mining advocates, “it’s not our intention to stop mining,” said Glenn Compton of ManaSota-88, another plaintiff in the Mosaic suit. “We just want to make it a better process.”
Mosaic worker Farris insists environmental groups go too far when they endanger people’s livelihoods.
“I’m all for the environment,” he says. “I love to hunt and fish. I take my kids out on the boat. I love camping. But people have got to have jobs.”
Steve Huettel can be reached at [email protected] or (727) 893-8128.

[Last modified: Nov 20, 2010 12:43 AM]
Copyright 2010 St. Petersburg Times

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-05/morocco-plans-800-acre-resort-hotel-funded-by-fertilizer-cash.html

By Brendan Borrell and Daniel Grushkin
Nov 5, 2010 11:15 AM ET

Béatrice Montagnier, a hotel specialist with consulting firm Horwath HTL, snapped pictures of an old warehouse and a jumble of sun-baked two-story concrete block homes outside the Moroccan town of Khouribga. It was May 2009 and Paris-based Montagnier was scoping out a planned site for an 800-acre hotel resort and museum. While she worked on details of project layout, one issue — funding — was not a concern. The estimated $1 billion needed to build the resort would come from the ground beneath her feet, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Nov. 8 issue. Khouribga and elsewhere in Morocco are home to the world’s biggest known deposits of phosphate, used in fertilizer, detergent, food additives, and more recently lithium-ion batteries. Sold for decades in its raw state for less than $50 per metric ton, it’s currently at about $125, according to World Bank figures. This is good news for Morocco’s King Mohammed VI, 47, who owns more than half the world’s phosphate reserves. Mohammed VI is the unofficial overseer of the state-owned phosphate monopoly, Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco’s largest industrial company. Most traders expect OCP to drive the commodity’s price higher, which means the cost of making everything from corn syrup to iPads will be going up. Phosphate as fertilizer is the engine powering modern agriculture, and its reserves are in decline almost everywhere except Morocco. Most phosphate mines, including those in the U.S., which produces 17 percent of global supply, have been in decline for the past decade, running out of quality rock and hindered by environmental regulation. That has forced companies to look farther afield for supplies.

Mosaic, BHP, Potash
Earlier this year, Mosaic Co. spent $385 million for a 35 percent stake in a Peruvian mine to supply rock to its phosphate operations in the U.S. and South America. Australia’s BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest mining company, made a $40 billion hostile takeover offer for Canada’s Potash Corp., a major supplier of both potash and phosphate. Even a temporary phosphate shortage could affect a range of U.S. industries. Phosphate fertilizer is used on just about every crop, though most in the U.S. goes to the 13 billion bushels of corn grown each year to make everything from corn syrup to cattle feed to ethanol. The 2007-08 food crisis gives clues to how a shortage might play out. At that time, rising food prices led to riots across Africa and Asia. Before the crisis was over, China had levied a 135 percent export tariff on its phosphate to protect its domestic food supply; phosphate there is still taxed at 110 percent at the height of the buying season.

85% of World’s Total
The scale of Morocco’s phosphate wealth was officially verified in September, when the International Fertilizer Development Center released its long-awaited update on global phosphate resources. Morocco’s portion went from the 5.7 billion tons still cited in U.S. Geologic Survey reports, to 50 billion tons — 85 percent of the world’s total. Even with 170 million tons of concentrated phosphate changing hands each year, the Moroccans likely have at least 300 to 400 years of rock available.

Talal Zouaoui, OCP’s director of communications, won’t agree or disagree with estimates, but says in an e-mail that Morocco has “significant reserves,” and notes that reserves denote only those quantities that countries have discovered and deem economically viable to extract. With a growing world population consuming more grain, more meat, and more biofuels, demand is expected to rise at a rate of 2 percent to 3 percent per year, according to the International Fertilizer Association. Dana Cordell, co-founder of the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, predicts that phosphate production will “peak” within the next 50 years.

Fertilizer, Coca-Cola
Not all phosphate becomes fertilizer: about 15 percent is turned into detergents or food additives, such as the tangy phosphoric acid in Coca-Cola, or the moisture-retaining salts in salami.
OCP controls 30 percent of global phosphate exports, and plans to increase annual production from 30 million tons to 54 million tons by 2015, investing $5 billion in the process. By that time, Prayon SA, a Belgian phosphate processor in which OCP owns a 50 percent stake, believes demand for phosphate as a component of the lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles could exceed demand for it in detergent. At September’s World Fertilizer Conference in San Francisco, Morocco’s ascendancy was the main topic of conversation.

Hotel Hopping
Asked about OCP, trader Mark Mangassarian answered with a question: “Oh, you mean the guys who are trying to drive up phosphate prices the most?” Mangassarian, who is assistant vice-president for sales at Nitron International in Stamford, Conn., spent three days doing deals at the San Francisco conference hopping from suite to suite at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square. Though the industry average for diammonium phosphate fertilizer has hovered around $500 this summer, the executives he sat down with weren’t willing to go below $550. A few weeks later, Mangassarian came to see it their way, and is paying $560. OCP’s tough negotiating tactics have irritated many in the industry. “You try to talk to them, and they don’t answer. They’ve always been like that. That’s their strategy,” says Taoufik Meddeb, who buys sulfur for Groupe Chimique Tunisien, another state-owned company and OCP’s biggest competitor in North Africa. “God just put the phosphate there,” said Jamal Bensari, a member of OCP’s delegation. “It is our only resource, and it is our responsibility.” ‘Quasi-Impossible’ OCP’s current communications director Zouaoui declined to arrange interviews for Bloomberg Businessweek following multiple requests in September and October. “It is quasi-impossible right now,” he explained. In a separate e-mail, he also noted that OCP is “subject to customary international governance standards for a global corporation, including transparency and accountability.”

Mohammed VI, called the King of the Poor for his efforts to raise Morocco’s living standards, has about $2 billion in assets, which places him seventh on Forbes’ list of the richest royals. That’s far behind Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai but well ahead of the Prince of Monaco. Although he is not technically the head of state, he has control of the country as both a secular and religious leader. He appoints the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, and has the power to overrule or dissolve the elected Parliament. His portrait adorns the first page of OCP’s annual reports, and his face appears in nearly every home and coffee shop. The Moroccan Embassy did not respond to requests for interviews with the King.

Disputed Territory
Western Sahara is a disputed territory. It’s also where Morocco’s best phosphate lies. The region known to the King as “Moroccan Sahara” begins just south of the fishing village of Tarfaya on the Atlantic coast. The UN calls it “the non-self- governing territory of Western Sahara” and deems it “occupied.” It’s a place where phosphate rumbles to the coast on the world’s longest conveyor belt, while tanks and soldiers roam alongside, defending the shipments from Sahrawi separatists.
When Spain withdrew from Western Sahara in 1975, some 350,000 Moroccans marched into the region with tents on their backs. The native Sahrawi fought back for 16 years under the leadership of the Algerian-backed Polisario rebels, signing a cease-fire in 1991. The UN continues to monitor the agreement with 215 uniformed peacekeepers, but a planned vote on self- determination has been repeatedly delayed. Today, approximately 90,000 Sahrawi live in refugee camps in Algeria, separated from their families in Moroccan-controlled territory by a 1,400-mile- long berm dotted with land mines.

Land Mines
OCP reports that just 2 percent of Morocco’s phosphate lies in the Phousboucraa mine at Bou Craa in Western Sahara, and that it accounts for 6 percent of sales. Companies in Australia and Norway have said they no longer use phosphate mined in Western Sahara. In August, Mosaic told the advocacy group Western Sahara Resource Watch that it has stopped buying rock from the territory. The U.S., in addition to needing the phosphate, sees Morocco as an ally in the war against terrorism. Last year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reaffirmed U.S. support for Morocco’s plan of “limited autonomy” for the territory, which stops short of the independence demanded by the Polisario.

Private Riads
Montagnier finished her consulting contract last year, but her employer, Horwath, has a small office in Rabat and is working on other projects. The King opened the Royal Mansour Marrakech hotel this year, with private riads — the traditional style of home with a courtyard and garden — going for $2,200 per night. For Khouribga, Montagnier has settled on three stars for the hotel, but says the final room tally awaits approval by OCP. Architects put the total price on the project, known as Mine Verte, at 665 million euros ($937 million). “Khouribga is the world capital of phosphates,” says Founoun Mohammed, 48, a subcontractor overseeing the first stages of a pipeline that will deliver phosphate in slurry form from Khouribga to the port of Jorf Lasfar south of Casablanca, 146 miles away. After work he settles down at the back of a favorite restaurant and talks business over seafood paella. A bottle of Moroccan wine is not to his liking, and he orders a French red for the table. “People will come from Europe, the United States, everywhere to see Khouribga. It will raise the level of the city.” He is in high spirits and pours a glass of wine for the waiter, who tosses it back in a single gulp. Mohammed says he loves his country: He is safe and has a good job, what else can he ask for? “The King,” he says, “is a gentleman.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Brendan Borrell at [email protected]; Daniel Grushkin through Bryant Urstadt in New York at [email protected]
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Amanda Jordan at [email protected]