[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 72 (Monday, June 12, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4970-S4971]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     SANCTIONS ON FOOD AND MEDICINE

  Mr. DORGAN. Madam President, I rise to talk about the issue of 
sanctions on food and medicine shipments to other countries in the 
world. I know I have talked about this on the floor many times. At the 
risk of being repetitive, which I think is important in this body, I 
say again, it is immoral for this country to have a policy of imposing 
sanctions on the shipment of food and medicine to any other country in 
the world.
  We have decided to impose economic sanctions on countries whose 
behavior we don't like. We have decided that economic sanctions is the 
way to punish certain countries. We don't like what Saddam Hussein in 
Iraq has been doing. He is an international outlaw, according to our 
country's view. Therefore, we want to punish him. So we impose economic 
sanctions.
  We don't like Fidel Castro in Cuba, according to our public policy. 
So we want to impose an embargo that, by the way, has been existing for 
40 years. We have sanctions against Iran, against North Korea. When we 
impose these sanctions, it is also included in those sanctions that we 
will not allow shipments of food and medicine to these same countries.
  As I said, I think it is fundamentally immoral for our country to 
decide what they will withhold and prohibit the shipment of food and 
medicine to any country in the world. It doesn't make any sense.
  I come at this from more than one standpoint. One, I represent a farm 
State. Yes, it bothers me that 11 percent of the international wheat 
market is off limits to our family farmers. We have folks that stand up 
here in the Senate and say: Well, we support the Freedom to Farm bill 
for family farmers. What about the freedom to sell bill? Why shouldn't 
farmers be free to sell into the marketplace where people are hungry 
and need food? What on Earth would persuade this country to have 
sanctions with respect to the shipment of food and medicine anywhere in 
the world? If my proposition is these sanctions are fundamentally wrong 
with respect to food and medicine sanctions, then let's change it.
  We have tried to change it. Last year, we had a bill on the floor of 
the Senate. Seventy Senators voted to get rid of sanctions on food and 
medicine shipments everywhere in the world. Seventy Senators said: 
Let's get rid of them. We got the bill to conference and it got 
hijacked because some people want to continue sanctions, especially on 
the country of Cuba.
  This year in the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Agriculture 
bill, I included an amendment that says: Get rid of all sanctions on 
food and medicine; get rid of them all with respect to Cuba and Iraq 
and North Korea. Get rid of all sanctions on food and medicine. That 
passed. It is in the Appropriations Committee. It will come to the 
floor on the Agriculture appropriations bill. Already we have some 
people in the Congress who are saying we are going to dump that. That 
is not going to become law. We are not going to get rid of sanctions on 
the shipment of food and medicine from this country to Cuba.
  As I have said before, I intend to push this issue very hard this 
year.
  It does not make sense to continue sanctions on the shipment of food 
and medicine to anywhere in the world. I want to read a couple of 
editorials that I think describe it as well. This is from the Seattle 
Post Intelligencer of May 28. This is an op-ed piece:

       Economic sanctions against nations are long overdue for a 
     critical appraisal. They make an appealing weapon. They are a 
     way to hurt people without shooting at them. Done in the 
     extreme, they inflict sickness and death. Sanctions have been 
     used for many years--more than 40 years against Cuba and 10 
     years against Iraq. Lesser sanctions have been set against 
     Libya, Iran and Burma. Threats of sanctions are annually 
     made, but not acted upon, against China. In any case, 
     economic sanctions have never removed a tyrant and they will 
     never remove, for example, Saddam Hussein. In all likelihood, 
     he will be in power until he dies. What sanctions have done 
     is to further impoverish the Iraqi people.

  Here is an excerpt from the Washington Times, an op-ed written by 
Steve Chapman:

       Things have changed a lot since 1990. The Soviet Union no 
     longer exists. The Federal

[[Page S4971]]

     budget deficit has vanished. But two things remain the same. 
     Iraq is under international economics sanctions, and the 
     sanctions are a failure.

  I don't have any great truck for Iraq or Saddam Hussein. I think he 
is an international outlaw. He operates well beyond the norms of 
international behavior. But it is also true that economic sanctions 
that include food and medicine represent an attempt to take aim at a 
dictator and hit hungry people, sick people, and poor people. It 
happens all the time when we impose food and medicine as part of 
economic sanctions.
  This is from the Charleston Gazette, June 1, 2000:

       Let's see if we've got this straight. Free trade with China 
     will help export American values, paving the path for the end 
     of communism in that nation. That is according to Republican 
     House Whip Tom DeLay from Texas. However, free trade with 
     Cuba can't be allowed because that would be rewarding a 
     Communist regime. That is also according to DeLay, who 
     simultaneously pushed for normalizing trade relations with 
     China, while trying to stop a bill that would allow the sale 
     of food and medicine to Cuba.

  A piece in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, penned by my colleague on 
the House side, Congressman Nethercutt, who, incidentally, offered the 
same amendment in the House Appropriations Committee that I offered in 
the Senate. He was successful, and they are going to try to dump that 
provision in the House of Representatives before we get to conference. 
He says:

       This week, Trent Lott, Majority Leader, defended the 
     position. He said, ``It is very easy to see the distinction 
     between China and Cuba. If you can't see it, maybe you are 
     just blind to it.''

  Well, I am not blind and I can't see it. I have been to Cuba. I was 
in Cuba last year. All I see in Cuba are people living in conditions of 
poverty. I see a country 90 miles to the north that has decided as a 
matter of public policy, because we don't like Fidel Castro, that we 
cannot move food and medicine to Cuba. Why? Because we have an embargo 
that includes the shipment of food and medicine. That is not fair to 
our farmers or to the poor people in Cuba.
  I visited a hospital in Cuba one day. I was in the intensive care 
ward. I was there for a few days. In the hospital there was a little 
boy lying in a coma. He was about 12 years old. There was no equipment. 
This was an intensive care ward with no equipment at all. There wasn't 
a beeping sound because there was nothing to beep. There were no cords 
hooked up because they didn't have equipment. He was lying in this room 
with his mother holding his hand, lying in a coma. I asked the doctor: 
You have no basic equipment here? He said: No, we don't have any 
equipment. The doctor said: We are out of 250 different kinds of 
medicines.
  I asked the question again when I came back to this country: Why is 
it that we have prohibitions against being able to send medicine to 
Cuba? Is sending medicine and food, or being able to sell medicine and 
food to Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, and Iran going to make this a less 
stable world? I don't think so.
  Let me end where I started. This is an immoral policy. Yes, I come at 
it from a selfish perspective. I represent farmers who ask a question 
that cannot be answered: Why, if we raise food in such abundant 
quantity, are we told that those who need it so badly can't have it 
because this country wants to punish their rulers and leaders? I can't 
answer farmers when they ask that question. It doesn't make sense. It 
is a policy that is bankrupt. We ought to change it. We have 70 votes 
in the Senate to change it, and they won't allow a vote in the House of 
Representatives. If they did, they would have 70 percent voting in 
favor to change it.
  So we are going to see in the coming weeks whether, once again, for a 
second year in a row, we have just a handful of people trying to hijack 
this effort to eliminate food and medicine from sanctions we impose on 
other countries around the world. When the roll is called, I think 70 
Senators will vote, as they did previously, to say food and medicine 
sanctions anywhere in the world are not good public policy. They are 
not the best of America. Let's eliminate them. Let's abolish that 
mentality. You can punish foreign leaders whose behavior we don't like 
without hurting poor and hungry people. The only conceivable reason 
this gets held up--and it got held up last year--is a few people 
decided that because Fidel Castro sticks his finger in America's eye 
from time to time, they want to continue this 40-year-old embargo. And 
they darn well want to insist on keeping food and medicine as part of 
the sanction because if they don't, they will be considered weak on 
Cuba. Well, being considered weak because they pursue a public policy 
that is wrongheaded is not, in my judgment, a model of consistency.
  Let us, in this session of the Congress, decide that at least on this 
marginal step forward, we will decide we will never again use food and 
medicine as part of economic sanctions, both in our interest and in the 
interest of poor, hungry, and sick people all around the world.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.

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