Motion to Discharge
Floor Speech
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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions be discharged from further consideration of S. 4394 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. RUBIO. Mr. President, I regret that that is the case. I understand the argument and if I could explain a little further.
Florida is identified with the citrus industry. People have long understood it. It is a big part of our State. Here is the best way to describe this to people. About 60 years ago, the FDA created a standard for what they consider pasteurized orange juice. For orange juice to be marked with a stamp that says ``pasteurized,'' no less than 10.5 percent of the weight of the juice has to be accounted for by soluble solids, such as naturally occurring sugar. So this is just an arbitrary number.
By the way, the 10.5 percent of the weight has nothing to with the nutrition. It has nothing to with the safety. It has nothing to with the quality.
They had to come up with a number to define the difference between orange juice and something that is not orange juice, and that was the number they came up with.
So for decades, the citrus industry in Florida has been following that specification, and it hasn't been a problem. Then Florida was impacted by this thing called citrus greening, pests that came from Asia, particularly from China. What it has done is it has ravaged the trees. It ravaged the trees to the point where one of the impacts it has is that now the sugar content--you wouldn't notice it if you drink it or if you eat one, but the sugar content of the fruit that is now on the trees, because of the greening, often falls under the 10.5. Again, no one would know. It is not any less safe. It is not any less nutritious. It just falls under that number. Then, obviously, the hurricane we had in 2017 made those problems even worse when they suffered the loss of a bunch of trees.
So now, to meet this arbitrary 10.5 percent threshold, the juice processors in Florida now have to blend in oranges and orange juice that have higher sugar content, and they usually have to import it from a foreign source. Again, there is no health benefit to doing that. In fact, you could probably argue that less sugar is probably better. You wouldn't taste the difference. You wouldn't know it. If I put two glasses of orange juice in front of you--one with the number they are asking for, which is 10 percent, and the other one with 10.5--you wouldn't notice the difference.
So they have been asking the FDA to change the standard so they don't have to import a bunch of oranges from Brazil and mix it just to be able to hit the sugar content. If they can't do it, the only thing that changes is that the final product can't be marketed as ``Florida orange juice.'' That is really the challenge we are facing.
We would love for this to go through the normal process. The problem is, by the time the FDA makes a decision on it, there may not be any growers left. Let me explain why that is a problem.
These citrus growers sit on valuable land. Every developer in the State is trying to get their hands on that land. They would love to develop it into a mall, into an industrial park. We are facing those problems everywhere. Once you turn farmland into a commercial use, industrial use, a housing development, you never get it back. I have seen farms turned into commercial development; I have never seen a commercial development be turned back into a farm.
Once we lose this land, we lose it forever. We lose it forever. So not only is it important to have it from a food security standpoint but from an environmental standpoint. Having something remain in agriculture, where the people who own it care deeply about the quality of the land and the water usage because it is key to their existence, is a better use of the land than turning it into an industrial park.
But, eventually, these agriculture owners will have to do something. Some have been in the business for generations, but at some point, they cannot grow enough food to justify continuing in business. They have people offering millions and millions of dollars to buy their land from them.
So this simple bill that I filed would provide certainty to the orange growers. By lowering the 10.5 content to 10.0--that is all it does, from 10.5 to 10.0--they will have some level of certainty that they will be able to continue in business.
I regret that there is an objection here today. I understand the desire to follow the FDA process, but I just want to be clear. No one is arguing--who knows about this--that going from 10.5 to 10.0 has any safety issue or anything of that nature. It is literally an undetectable difference, but it would make a big difference for the citrus growers of Florida.
If we are not going to do it this way, I hope we can get a hearing and get this passed. I am not sure if a couple of years from now, we are going to have a citrus industry. If we lose them or lose that land, we will never get it back.
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