[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 16 (Thursday, January 28, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1103-S1104]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




           REGAINING FARMER POWER WITH HELP FROM ALAN GUEBERT

 Mr. KERREY. Mr. President, while the nation's eyes are turned 
toward Washington and the Senate impeachment trial, I would like to 
briefly turn the nation's eyes away from Washington and toward the 
economic catastrophe that is devastating our family farmers.
  Prices are falling at alarming rates, and family farms are perishing, 
as rural America faces its worst crisis since the Great Depression. And 
to some, it may appear as though Nero is fiddling while Rome burns.
  So I want to assure my constituents--and indeed all family farmers 
across our great nation--that while Congress spends it time deciding 
the fate of the President, some members have not lost sight of their 
daily struggle to make ends meet, and their fate.
  On Tuesday, along with Minority Leader Daschle and several other farm 
state Democratic Senators, we introduced the Agricultural Safety Net 
and Market Competitiveness Act of 1999. With this legislation we intend 
to restore an economic safety net to producers and rural communities so 
that they can remain vital during these times of economic hardship. As 
well, we proposed ways in which we can revitalize markets--both 
domestic and abroad--so that all American producers have a fair shot to 
compete in the marketplace. We also introduced a bill, S. 30, to offset 
extreme losses to our producers resulting from severe economic and 
weather-related events.
  I want my constituents and all family farmers to know that I will 
welcome the day when we can turn our attentions toward doing the 
business of the American people, and more specifically American 
farmers.
  In the January 18, 1999 edition of the Lincoln Journal Star, farm 
journalist Alan Guebert wrote a thought provoking piece describing 10 
ways in which the average American and American farmer can help regain 
the power they have lost and continue to lose during this economic 
catastrophe.
  I urge my colleagues to take a moment to read this very important 
article, and I ask that Mr. Guebert's article be printed in the Record.
  The article follows.

           [From the Lincoln Journal Star, January 18, 1999]

                           (By Alan Guebert)

       In the nearly 100 farmer calls, letters, e-mails and faxes 
     to this office in the first two weeks of 1999, the central 
     theme in most was the same: farmer powerlessness.
       Many correspondents cited farmers' dwindling share of the 
     retail food dollar as evidence of their growing 
     powerlessness. Others likened supersized, globalized 
     businesses--packers and grain companies being the favored 
     targets--to power-taking, farmer-breaking, peasant-making 
     monsters. And still other suggested ``free, but not fair 
     trade'' drains them of market power.
       Despite the woe-filled times, farmers are not powerless. 
     There are many things all can do individually to claim, or 
     reclaim, the power they feel has been vacuumed from them. 
     Here's a list of 10 actions farmers or ranchers can take to 
     be empowered:
       1. Get informed. If information is power--and it is--the 
     inverse must be that ignorance is powerlessness. Go to the 
     library, get on the Internet, read the newspaper, turn off 
     the television.
       And don't read, listen or view just the ag press. We're 
     some of the duller knives in the journalism drawer. Include 
     nonag sources, too, such as The Wall Street Journal, The 
     Washington Post Weekly Edition and National Public Radio's 
     Morning Edition.
       2. Sign a checkoff recall petition. Petitions are 
     circulating for recall votes in both the pork and beef 
     checkoffs. This year also should bring a recall petition for 
     the soybean checkoff. It's your right to petition and your 
     right to vote. Secure it, then exercise it.
       3. Write your U.S. representatives and senators to demand 
     full, open and immediate price reporting in all ag markets. 
     Don't ask

[[Page S1104]]

     for it; demand it. The only entity that can make the present 
     hide-and-seek system work are integrators. And not in just 
     today's livestock markets. Tomorrow's grain markets will be 
     equally messy if the current price reporting system is not 
     pried open so all farmers have equal standing and full 
     information when approaching the market.
       4. Don't buy from firms that are destroying farm markets 
     and rural communities. Holdover from the '60s, heh? 
     Positively. You don't have to buy eggs from a sleazy company 
     that violates every state pollution law on the books; you 
     don't need to buy chicken from a firm that buys members of 
     Congress and Cabinet members; and you don't have to buy 
     livestock feed--at whatever price--from the integrated 
     conglomerate that is building hog units and destroying your 
     neighbors' businesses and families. And sure, withholding 
     your nickels and dimes may not stop the inevitable. But it 
     won't finance it either.
       5. Join a farm organization--any of them--and get involved. 
     You can't hit the game-winning home run if you're not a 
     player.
       6. Make 1999 the year you reclaim your co-ops, especially 
     your regional co-ops. It--and as a stockholder, really you--
     should not be in the business of ruining the livestock 
     industry and building a fabulously well-paid bureaucracy in 
     the process. If you reshape it from its present vertical 
     structure to a more horizontal structure--the co-op shape 
     your grandfather envisioned--more of its profits will come 
     back to co-op's owners. That's you.
       7. Push, prod, poke, pound and humiliate Congress to pass 
     tough, meaningful campaign finance reform. The present system 
     is a dollar democracy, owned and operated by well-oiled 
     influence peddlers and puppeteers who make politicians dance 
     like an organ grinder's monkey.
       It is the very rotten core of your growing powerlessness.
       8. The United States grows billions of pounds of beef and 
     not one pound of bananas. Yet this administration will fight 
     for the handful of very rich U.S. banana exporters and not 
     impose similar import tariffs on European goods in support of 
     900,000 U.S. cattlemen (See No. 7.) Every farm group and 
     every farmer should make exposing this sham one of their top 
     five priorities in 1999.
       9. Draw the line and categorically oppose every new 
     agribusiness merger. Every one. Why is the farmer's share of 
     the food dollar dwindling? Largely because big--and getting 
     bigger--corporations have strengthened their holds on choke 
     points in the food chain until they choke their profits out 
     of you.
       10. Don't quit. To paraphrase an old axiom, all it takes 
     for bad ideas to further dominate agriculture is for good 
     people--you--to do nothing.

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