[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 138 (Wednesday, October 13, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12467-S12468]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




   AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, FOOD AND DRUG ADMINISTRATION, AND 
RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2000--CONFERENCE REPORT--Continued

  Mr. DORGAN. Having said all that, let me turn to the question of the 
Agriculture Appropriations bill. Let me ask how much time I have 
remaining? I had sought 20 minutes.

[[Page S12468]]

  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The minority has 136 minutes remaining.
  Mr. DORGAN. I will take 5 minutes. My friend, the Senator from 
Illinois, is waiting and the Senator from Mississippi, who manages the 
bill, has the patience of Job. I will not spend a lot of additional 
time.
  I want to run through a couple charts, if I might. I want people to 
think through if this were their income, what their situation would be. 
Every one of you have a job; you have an income. If you have a 
business, you have some profit or an expected profit. Ask yourself what 
your situation would be personally if your job was to raise corn. This 
is what has happened to the price of corn; it has dropped dramatically. 
Think of what that would mean if that happened to your income.
  What about if you are a producer out there, a family farmer raising 
some children and trying to operate a farm? You are raising wheat. Here 
is what has happened to your income. It has plummeted?
  What if you are raising some kids and trying to operate a family farm 
and doing well and you are producing soybeans? This is what happened to 
your income. Again, a drastic reduction.
  Do you know of any other business in which prices have fallen as much 
as for wheat, corn, soybeans?
  Likewise, what if somebody said that the product you raise, a bushel 
of wheat, for example, as a percentage of the cereal grain dollar, was 
going to shrink by over half?
  Take another example. Say you were raising hogs and not too long ago 
you sold a 200-pound hog and got $20 for it. Then that hog was 
slaughtered and the meat from that hog went to the grocery store and 
was sold for $350. There is something wrong with that picture.
  Is there something wrong with the stream of income that goes to the 
person who actually raised that hog versus the amount of income that 
goes to the middle people who process it? Absolutely.
  We could go through chart after chart, those of us who represent farm 
States. All of us know what the story is. The story is, our family 
farmers are in crisis. We have a farm bill that has an inadequate 
safety net. We have the collapse of grain prices in this country in an 
almost unprecedented way. We have the weakening Asian economy, which 
means fewer exports. We have concentration and monopolies in every 
direction, which cuts the farmer's share of the food dollar.
  When Continental and Cargill are allowed to get married, as they just 
did, two big companies gathering together under one umbrella, it 
demonstrates that our antitrust laws don't work. Every direction the 
farmer looks, he finds a monopoly. Want to raise some grain and ship it 
on a railroad? You are held up for prices that are outrageous in order 
to haul it by the railroad. The same is true with virtually every other 
commodity such as selling wheat into a grain trade that is highly 
concentrated. In every set of circumstances, farmers have been 
injured. And the result of all of these adverse circumstances coming 
together, especially the twin calamities of the collapse of commodity 
prices and weather-related crop disasters, means we have a full-scale 
emergency on our family farms.

  This piece of legislation is not particularly good. I am going to 
vote for it, but with no great enthusiasm. I was one of the conferees. 
The conference met for a brief period of time. Senator Durbin was a 
conferee, as well, and he will recall we met for a period of time, and 
one of the things we pushed for was to stop using food as a weapon. No 
more food embargoes. Guess what. That was our strong Senate position, 
but it is not in this report.
  This report doesn't end the embargoes on food or end using food as a 
weapon. This report doesn't do that because the conference dumped it. 
We didn't do it because we were part of the conference, but the 
conference didn't meet. It adjourned in a pique and never got back 
together. We are told the Senate majority leader and the Speaker of the 
House cobbled together this bill, with some technical help. When we saw 
it again, it said we want to continue to use food as a weapon and keep 
embargoes on various countries around the world.
  I am not happy with this bill. Let's provide income support to 
farmers, it says, after we pushed for that. But it says do it with 
something called AMTA payments. We are going to have people getting 
emergency payments who didn't lose any money because of collapsed 
prices; they weren't even farming. In fact, the payment limits have 
gone up. So it is conceivable that some landowners are going to get 
$460,000 without putting a hand to the plow. That is the new payment 
limit. Can you imagine telling a taxpayer in a city someplace that we 
want to help farmers in trouble, and they ask which farmers? Well, 
somebody is going to get a $460,000 payment whether or not they are 
actually farming. That is not helping America's family farmers. So 
there is a lot wrong with the payments provided by this bill.
  Similarly, the disaster aid is only $1.2 billion and contains no 
specific line item for flooded lands. We know that amount shortchanges 
all the known needs. We know that is not going to cover the drought of 
the Northeast, the flooding from Hurricane Floyd and the prevented 
planting in the Upper Midwest--all of the disasters that need to be 
addressed across this country. But the combination of things in this 
legislation has put us in a position of asking if we are going to 
provide some help or no help.
  We are in a situation where we have to say yes, we will vote for this 
package, but without great enthusiasm. This was done the wrong way. 
Most of us know that. We should have helped farmers who lost income 
because of collapsed prices and weather disasters, the people who 
really produce a crop. We ought not to have a $460,000 upper payment 
limit, and we ought not to have dropped the provision that says we are 
going to end embargoes on food and medicine forever. It was wrong to 
drop that. We know that.
  I will have to vote for this conference report, without enthusiasm, 
because there is an emergency and a crisis, and some farmers will not 
be around if we don't extend a helping hand now. Never again should we 
do it this way. This is the wrong way to do it. It is not the right way 
to respond to the emergency that exists in farm country.
  My friend, the Senator from Illinois, wants to speak. I thank him for 
his patience. I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Burns). The Senator from Illinois is 
recognized.

                          ____________________