[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 10]
[Senate]
[Pages 13926-13928]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                            THE FARM CRISIS

  Mr. DORGAN. This morning, as chairman of the Democratic Policy 
Committee, I convened a hearing on the farm crisis. About 10 to 12 of 
my colleagues came to the hearing. We had a number of family farmers 
from across the country testify.
  We had Woody Barth, a farmer from Solen, ND, testify; Rob Lynch, a 
farmer from Zillah, WA; Glenn Brackman, a farmer from Lafayette County, 
AR. We had some folks from Illinois, Iowa, and Kentucky. We talked 
about the farm crisis and about public policies that ought to be 
employed by this Congress to respond to the farm crisis.
  I pointed out that a lot of people are not aware of the farm crisis. 
It is probably a circumstance that farmers working in quiet 
desperation, many of them threatened with losing their farms, are going 
through a period that most Americans do not understand and don't know 
about.
  Every day we hear the stock market is up or down, mostly up--the 
stock market has gone to 11,000, now back down a bit. But the fact is, 
this country generally hears good economic news about where the stock 
market is going, about new information technology, about the progress 
of new companies, about the new day, about the global economy. Yet the 
folks who stay at home and produce America's food on our family farms 
are in desperate trouble.
  Wendell Barry, a farmer from Port Royal, KY, testified today. He is 
also an author, a wonderful guy, kind of a philosopher-writer type. He 
wrote some things. In fact, he has written a book called ``Another Turn 
of the Crank.''
  I will read a couple things he has written that I think really bear 
on this issue. I do it in the context of the bill that is to be on the 
floor. We did have the agriculture appropriations bill on the floor of 
the Senate. It will come back, hopefully, as soon as an agreement is 
reached with respect to the Patients' Bill of Rights.
  When it comes back to the floor, Senator Harkin and I intend to offer 
an amendment similar to the amendment we offered during the emergency 
supplemental appropriations bill. That amendment lost on a 14-to-14 tie 
vote in the conference.
  We also offered a proposal in the agriculture appropriations 
subcommittee. But this is the time, when the agriculture appropriations 
bill is on the floor, for the Congress to decide what it will do with 
respect to emergency responses to the farm crisis.
  There are some who might counsel we should do nothing, that it 
doesn't matter whether there are farmers in this country. They would 
say: Food will be produced anyway, and it doesn't matter much who 
produces it. We can farm America from California to Maine with 
corporate farms, and that is just fine.
  I do not happen to share that view. I think that is a view that is 
devoid of all common sense. It suggests there is no worth and no value 
at all to the culture of family farming, that family farming doesn't 
contribute to our country, that the fact there are people living out on 
the land is irrelevant. The fact that those people combine to make 
small communities and build our main streets and build our churches and 
create good neighborhoods is irrelevant; that kind of investment and 
that kind of creation in our country doesn't count.
  I guess those who think that way look through the lens of perhaps 
Wall Street or others who see only dollars and cents, only rows of 
columns. You add them up or you subtract them. You reach a balance, and 
that is the cost. It just eliminates, of course, the question of what 
is the value. Are family farmers contributing value to this country? 
Will the loss of family farmers matter to our country? The answer is 
yes on both counts.
  Mr. Wendell Barry from Port Royal, KY, writes:

       As we all know, we have much to answer for in our use of 
     this continent from the beginning, but in the last half 
     century we have added to our desecrations of nature a 
     deliberate destruction of our rural communities. The 
     statistics I cited at the beginning are incontrovertible 
     evidence of this.

  He cited statistics about the loss of farms, the depopulation of our 
farm belt, and so on.

       But so is the condition of our farms and forests and rural 
     towns. If you have eyes to see, you can see that there is a 
     limit beyond which machines and chemicals cannot replace 
     people; there is a limit beyond which mechanical or economic 
     efficiency cannot replace care.
       I am talking here about the common experience, the common 
     fate of rural communities in our country for a long time. It 
     has been, and it will increasingly be, the common fate of 
     rural communities in other countries. The message is plain 
     enough, and we have ignored it too long: the great, 
     centralized economic entities of our time do not come into 
     rural places in order to improve them by ``creating jobs.'' 
     They come to take as much value as they can take, as cheaply 
     and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in 
     ``job creation'' only so long as the jobs can be done much 
     more cheaply by humans than by machines.

  Mr. Barry writes, about liberals and conservatives, an interesting 
admonition:

       Long experience has made it clear--as we might say to the 
     liberals--that to be free we

[[Page 13927]]

     must limit the size of government and we must have some sort 
     of home rule. But it is just as clear--as we might say to the 
     conservatives--that it is foolish to complain about big 
     government if we do not do everything we can to support 
     strong local communities and strong community economies.

  He is right about that.
  We must decide as a Congress whether we are going to support 
America's family farms. I spoke at the hearing today, when I questioned 
the witnesses, about where I come from. I have told colleagues often 
about that. I come from a rural county in southwestern North Dakota 
that is the size of the State of Rhode Island. That county had 5,000 
people when I left, and there are now 3,000 people living in that 
county. The county next to it is about the same size and there are 900 
people living in that county.
  We are fast depopulating rural America. Rural economies in small 
towns are shrinking like prunes. We now have prices for commodities, 
when the family farmer raises a crop and hauls it to the market, that 
are deplorable. The family farmer is told when he or she takes a 
truckload of wheat to the country elevator--the grain trade says: This 
doesn't have value. The food you produce is not of great interest to 
us. It is not worth very much.
  At the same time, we have people who come and testify before the 
Congress that the Sudan, for instance, old women climb trees to try to 
find leaves to eat. We know much of the world is hungry, and we also 
know that while much of the world is hungry, the grain market tells our 
farmers their food isn't worth very much.
  Something is not connected there, and this Congress must try to 
reconnect it.
  We only have two choices, it seems to me. One is an opportunity, on 
an short-term emergency basis, to pass an emergency farm bill. It seems 
to me the question for this Congress is: Are we going to pass a short-
term emergency bill to try to help family farmers? Second, are we going 
to repair the farm program, and the trade agreements, and other things 
that conspire to injure family farmers?
  On the first issue, Senator Harkin and I intend to offer an amendment 
for $5 billion to $6 billion to try to provide short-term emergency 
help for family farmers on this agriculture appropriations bill when it 
is brought back to the floor. We will have a fight about that. I don't 
know how that will turn out. I hope Congress will say that family 
farmers matter.
  It was interesting to me that when the President sent a request down 
for military aid to restore and refresh the accounts in the Pentagon 
for conducting airstrikes in Kosovo, Congress said to the President: 
No, you are wrong about that, Mr. President, you didn't ask for enough 
money. We insist that you give $6 billion more. Mr. President, you 
shortchanged us in your request for defense, so we are going to give 
you what you ask for and we are going to add $6 billion more to your 
request for defense.
  Well, gee, that came from conservatives. I hope those same 
conservatives will agree that the effort to save America's family 
farmers is as important. Don't tell me there is not money. There was 
money to say to the President we want to add $6 billion above what the 
Pentagon said it needed. If there is money to do that, there is surely 
money to invest in family farmers in rural America. So my hope will be 
that we are able, on a short-term basis, to pass an emergency bill; 
and, second, having done that, we will then revisit the question of the 
underlying farm program.
  This farm program is not working. It ought to be apparent to 
everyone. The farm program that the Congress passed essentially said 
let us do whatever the marketplace says ought to be done. But there is 
not a free market in agriculture. There is not now, and has not been, a 
free market in agriculture. Our farmers look at trade, and what they 
find is that markets are closed to them in many corners of the world. 
So we raise a product we want to sell overseas and the markets are 
closed. Or if you raise, for example, beef, you will discover not only 
are the markets closed in some areas, but in other areas, such as 
Japan, you will pay a 45-percent tariff to get American beef into 
Japan, only to find out that the Canadian beef --both live cattle and 
hogs, and slaughtered beef and hogs--coming down is increasing at a 
very rapid pace. So we have grain and livestock coming in undercutting 
our markets. We find foreign markets are not open to us, and we have 
all of these trade negotiators running around doing trade agreements 
that have undercut our agriculture producers.
  We need a farm program that works and trades policies that make more 
sense than the current policies. I voted against NAFTA and the United 
States-Canada free trade agreement, and I voted against the GATT 
agreement. I did all of that because I think that, while we need 
expanded trade, we do not, and should not, embrace trade agreements 
that are fundamentally unfair to rural America.
  I recall when I was on the House Ways and Means Committee and the 
United States-Canada free trade agreement came to the committee, and 
the Trade Ambassador, who I won't name--Clayton Yeutter--said to us 
that the trade agreement itself would not result in a massive flood of 
Canadian grain coming across our border. I said, well, I think it will, 
and you know it will. ``Put it in writing,'' I said. The Trade 
Ambassador wrote to us on the committee guaranteeing that it would not 
happen. It wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
  It happened, and it happened quickly. Not only did it happen--massive 
quantities of durum and spring wheat came across our border flooding 
our market, undercutting the market for American farmers--but we were 
then neutered in our ability to respond to it because he also traded 
away the remedies. So we didn't have a remedy for it.
  That was in the United States-Canada free trade agreement. That 
passed the House Ways and Means Committee 34-1. I was the one. I didn't 
feel lonely a bit because I knew exactly what was going to happen with 
the agreement. Farmers' interests were traded away. In my judgment, we 
ought not accept trade agreements like that, whether it is United 
States-Canada, NAFTA, or GATT.
  Speaking of NAFTA, after the United States-Canada free trade 
agreement, they negotiated NAFTA. The economists were telling us what a 
great deal it was. After the trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, 
the trade surplus we had with Mexico turned into a big deficit in a 
short time. The trade deficit with Canada doubled in a short time. 
Instead of creating new jobs in this country, we lost massive numbers 
of jobs. All these economists who were predicting 300,000 jobs were 
just fundamentally wrong. We lost a lot of jobs as a result of that.
  They said if we just pass these agreements, we will get from Mexico 
the product of low-skill wages. Do you know what we got? The three 
biggest products coming in from Mexico are automobiles, electronics, 
and automobile parts--all products of high-skilled labor. We now have 
more automobiles imported into this country from Mexico than the United 
States exports to all the rest of the world. That is what we got with 
NAFTA--again, undercutting our interests, hurting a lot of producers in 
this country, and especially injuring family farmers.
  Well, the point I am making is this: We had testimony this morning 
from folks who came from across the country to say we have a very 
serious problem in rural America. We can't fix that problem on a 
partisan basis. We need Republicans and Democrats together to agree 
that, No. 1, there is a farm crisis, and, No. 2, they are willing to do 
something about it, to respond on an emergency basis, and then to 
repair a farm program that is fundamentally deficient, which doesn't 
value family farming, a farm program that says it doesn't matter who 
farms. That, in my judgment, misses a lot of what is important in 
American life.
  My hope is that in the next couple of days, as we offer amendments--
Senator Harkin, myself, and others--on an emergency basis, we will be 
able to strike a bipartisan agreement to do the right thing on behalf 
of family farmers. I know that it is a message that some get tired of 
hearing, perhaps, but I

[[Page 13928]]

come from farm country and I care a lot about what is happening out in 
our part of the country.
  North Dakota is a wonderful State. It has a lot of rural counties, 
and the fact is that not just family farmers but machinery and 
equipment dealers, Main Street businesses, and so many other people are 
suffering so much through this economic distress, even at a time when 
the rest of the country seems to be doing so well.
  I had a letter from a young boy who talked about the distress his 
folks were going through while trying to hang onto their family farm. 
He said: My dad can feed 180 people, and he can't feed his family. He 
was talking about the fact that the family farm is so productive in 
this country, and they are losing so much money. You hear this over and 
over again.
  This Congress, it seems to me, must respond. We are going to try to 
force that response, first with respect to the underlying agriculture 
appropriations bill with an emergency package, and, second, hopefully, 
to revisit and readdress the entire structure embodied in the 
underlying farm bill.
  I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to address the 
body for 10 minutes.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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