Source: Maui Time, Maui News, Best of Maui, Maui Activities

Remove Images Maui County The Maui 10 Who’s the county’s most powerful player? by By Anthony Pignataro November 30, 2006 RANK   PREVIOUS   COMPANY     1                1              Dowling Co.     2                3              Maui Land & Pineapple Co.     3                4              Tesoro Hawai`i     4                5              Weinberg Foundation     5                2              Alexander & Baldwin     6              10              Monsanto Hawai`i     7                6              Makena Resort     8                7              Maui Electric Co.     9                8              Wailuku Water Co.    10               9              Hawaiian Telcom NOT SO SWEET DEAL In the highly competitive, super-charged business climate that is Maui, it's not enough for a corporation—especially one like Alexander & Baldwin—to simply advocate for better, more rational policies. There comes a time when it must use its corporate power and influence to better this island, nation and even world. For pretty much the last decade, A&B—which owns Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar, one of the most famous and powerful sugar growers in the nation—has coyly dropped hints in various newspaper articles that it wouldn't mind if the massive sugar subsidies handed out by the federal government were to go away. For the ostensibly free-trade Republicans who have run the federal government for the last decade, this should have provided them the necessary cover to dump the subsidies. But no. And now, according to the Nov. 27 issue of The New Yorker, our sugar subsidies are hindering this nation's attempts to get more energy efficient. It's all about ethanol, a biofuel far cleaner than petroleum gas. The problem is that we currently derive ethanol from corn, which isn't in itself energy efficient. It would be far more efficient to derive ethanol from sugarcane, but our current sugar subsidies have made that product prohibitively expensive to simply dump into a fuel refinery. Were A&B more powerful, it could help sweep away the sugar subsidies, ushering in a new sugar-ethanol world of cleaner engines and less pollution. GOING TO SEED Monsanto rises this week on news that no less a personage than UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently announced that if biotechnology falls into the wrong hands, the results could be "catastrophic" for the world. "As biological research expands, and technologies become increasingly accessible," he said, "this potential for accidental or intentional harm grows exponentially." Now that's power! MTW