The farm bill President Clinton signed recently included $200 million added by Senator Bob Dole for restoration of the Everglades and the Florida Bay and coral reefs to the south. And the president has endorsed a program calling for an additional $500 million for the purpose.

However, voting money for the Everglades makes it easier to maintain a 60-year-old subsidy for sugar that is the reason the Everglades needs restoration.

• Millionaire cane growers have covered about 500,000 acres of swampland between Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades National Park with crops.

• They divert the water flow that feeds the Everglades to water their fields and cause pollution with pesticides, herbicides and phosphate-laden fertilizers.

• Among the results are an algae bloom the size of Rhode Island in Florida Bay that is seeping through the Florida Keys to the Atlantic, where it is suffocating vast stretches of the only coral reef off the North American continent.

Since the New Deal, the federal government has limited cane imports and offered growers subsidized loans:

• The loan program now costs taxpayers about $120 million per year. The sugar import restrictions double the domestic price of sugar from roughly 11 cents per pound to more than 22 cents.

• According the General Accounting Office, this costs consumers more than $1.4 billion per year, and others put the cost closer to $3 billion.

A coalition of environmentalists, free traders and soft drink and candy manufacturers oppose the subsidies. But in addition to cane growers, the sugar program is supported by midwestern corn and sugar beet growers, since raising the price of sugar increases demand for their substitute sweeteners.

The $200 million will come from a tax on sugar growers, as would the $500 million in additional funds Clinton still wants. But since the subsidy program remains, it's consumers who will pay to clean up the mess.