[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 17]
[Senate]
[Pages 24584-24585]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                             SENATE AGENDA

  Mr. THOMAS. Mr. President, I would like to talk about a number of 
things.
  First, we are talking about the farm bill, but we have taken many 
different directions in terms of the economic stimulus. It needs to be 
extended.
  The President suggested a package. The Republicans did not have 
anything to say about the bill that came out of committee. It was 
totally Democrat.
  We need to make some changes in order to get this done. This isn't 
about the House. The only talk has been about what the House has done. 
They can do what they choose. We ought to do what we think is right.
  The President asked for an extension of unemployment benefits for 13 
weeks for Americans who lost their jobs due to the terrorist attacks. I 
am sure some will agree with that. He asked for $11 billion for the 
States to help low-income workers obtain health insurance for a certain 
period of time. I suppose everyone would agree with that to maintain 
that sort of help, wouldn't they?
  Also, of course, in order to create some jobs, we have been talking 
about accelerated depreciation to encourage companies to go ahead and 
purchase material and purchase machinery to create jobs. That is really 
what it is all about. Partial expensing, tax relief for low- and 
moderate-income workers--these are things that are all in the package.
  It isn't as if everyone has a different idea, but we ought to have a 
chance to talk about them. We ought to have a chance to bring up those 
things and to decide what the majority of this body would like. I am 
sorry, I do not quite understand how we got off into this: If the 
Democrats do not agree, then nothing should happen; if the Republicans 
do not agree, then nothing should happen. That is not the way we should 
operate. So I am hopeful we can do this. I indeed think we should.
  We are going to have to make some decisions in terms of priorities. 
Obviously, there is not much time left, whether we get out this week or 
whether we stay until Christmas. In either case, there is not a lot of 
time.
  We have three more appropriations bills in conference that have to be 
resolved. Those have to be done. We got through a tough appropriations 
bill last Friday by staying here until 12:30 on Friday night. We will 
have a tough one with Health and Human Services, I am sure. But those 
need to be done.
  Then we need to make judgments whether we are going to have energy, 
whether we are going to have a farm bill, whether we are going to have 
the insurance package--a lot of things that people talk about having. 
The question is, What is the priority for us at this time?
  Quite frankly, I think the leadership has been a little slow in 
trying to set forth their priorities. There is no use listing 15 
different things people would like to do. We are not going to do that, 
obviously.
  Indeed, in many cases we perhaps are better off to take a little more 
time on these tough bills to really decide where we want to be in 10 or 
15 years, such as in agriculture, as to what we want agriculture to 
look like over a period of time. What we do on this bill is going to 
have a great deal of impact on agriculture.
  This bill will last for 6 years, but it will have an impact beyond 
that. Quite frankly, we have wrestled with this issue for quite some 
time. I have been involved in agriculture all my life in one way or 
another. We seem to kind of move in short spurts to take care of what 
the problem is here, what the problem is there; and, yes, you have to 
do that, of course. But the fact is, we ought to be looking at a policy 
that takes us down the road to where we want to be, where we have a 
safety net

[[Page 24585]]

of some kind for agriculture, where agricultural production is needed 
in the marketplace, where there is a marketplace for agricultural 
production, where we do some of the kinds of things that will maintain 
open spaces and the conservation and land over time that we would like 
to have. Those are the kinds of long-term things that I think are very 
important.
  So as we undertake farm bills, they need to be given a lot of 
thought. That did not happen in the committee, as a matter of fact. We 
only had a very short time to deal with it. And it became an issue for 
the chairman, the leadership, to get that bill out in 10 days, or a 
week or so. So we were talking about various numbers of titles. We 
would get the title of the proposal one night and try to vote on it the 
next morning. That isn't the way to do it. We did not have time to 
digest it, let alone have an opportunity to talk with the people at 
home in terms of how it would impact agriculture. And that really is 
part of it.
  The bill that is before us now is, of course, the Harkin bill. I 
think we need to support a bill that will continue to move agriculture 
towards a market-oriented situation so that the emphasis and the 
incentives for agriculture are to produce those things the price would 
indicate are to be marketed.
  There are programs in the past we have used with certain very high 
price supports that encouraged production in which there was no 
marketability. Everyone wants to have this underpinning support, of 
course, but then you have to be very careful as to what you do with 
that.
  We need to place more emphasis on broader agriculture. Agriculture 
bills that started generally in the 1930s were oriented towards what 
are called the program crops. They are corn and soybeans and half a 
dozen crops, mostly in the Middle West. And now agriculture has changed 
to where you have all kinds of crops in all kinds of places.
  So I think in the future, as we look to where we want to go, we have 
to find a program that deals with more people in agriculture for some 
kind of safety net security.
  Some 40 percent of agricultural products goes into foreign trade. So 
we have to deal with the kind of trade arrangements that we have around 
the world, WTO particularly. We have to have a farm program that does 
not conflict there or allows other countries to put up obstacles to our 
foreign trade. So those are the kinds of issues that need to be 
considered.
  We need to keep working lands in production. The idea of having a 
program that sets aside acres and acres of land in some kind of 
conservation reserve, where they are no longer productive, is not an 
economically sound policy to have over time. What we need to do is have 
a conservation program that impacts all of these acres and lets them 
continue to be useful, whether it is grass, whether it is trees, or 
whatever it turns out to be.
  The bill before us generally takes us in the wrong direction, takes 
us back towards the agricultural programs of the 1930s during the 
Depression. It endorses higher loan rates which would encourage 
overproduction. Prices for U.S. products, that are almost out of reach 
for our markets around the world, will be even higher.
  It has a commodity title that puts, because of our arrangements in 
world trade, our producers and industry at risk of retaliation. It 
threatens to exceed our so-called ``amber box'' obligations in WTO. 
They are watching every move we make to see if that is or is not the 
case. And it can impede us with the kinds of difficulties it brings.
  The conservation title is really sort of a gimmick. It substantially 
boosts conservation spending in fiscal years 2002 to 2006 and then 
reduces it dramatically for the remainder of the time simply to make it 
fit into the budget. That isn't going to work over a period of time. 
That is a ballooning of expenditures early to make it acceptable, and 
then it does not continue until the bill expires.
  So these are some of the issues with which we are faced. We can 
change those if we have an opportunity to have amendments, if we have 
an opportunity to consider a bill that will be proposed as an 
alternative that has some different ideas in it. We should have an 
opportunity to vote on that.
  But with more and more environmental provisions that landowners and 
farmers and ranchers have to abide with--and, indeed, in some cases at 
least they should--then there needs to be assistance for that, 
assistance in the future to have the kind of technical help that is 
required, for instance, in nonpoint source water protection.
  There are lots of things that have to be done to comply with EPA 
regulations by landowners. They need help to do that. That is one of 
the things that ought to be done. We ought to be able to have a budget 
that goes out over time.
  The Cochran-Roberts amendment will be a substitute that takes a 
little different direction, gives us an option, gives us a chance to do 
some things. The payments are considered to be WTO ``green box'' 
payments, so you can have support for agriculture without running into 
conflicts in terms of trade. It will not place our producers at risk 
for a challenge from other countries. It gives an opportunity to 
producers to obtain support through a farm savings account so they can 
continue to save with the help of Government contributions.
  The conservation title has programs that keep working lands in 
production, and it extends it beyond the program crops. My State, of 
course, is largely a livestock State, so conservation that applies to 
grasslands, and those kinds of things, is equally as interesting.
  There is a program called the Environmental Quality Incentives 
Program, EQIP, which provides technical assistance. That is a program 
that is quite important, I believe.
  So we are going to have an opportunity to look at some of the options 
to see if we can do the things that I think are most important; that 
is, to have a plan over time that provides for the encouragement of 
production, production that will then be marketed, that provides for 
the conservation of all the lands, so when we are through with the 
land, we will see that we have open spaces and that we have an effort 
made through this program to develop more and more markets, whether 
they be overseas or whether they be domestic, and that it is fiscally 
responsible so that we have a budget for the entire length of the bill 
and one that is trade compliant.
  I am certainly in favor of us having a bill. I don't think it makes a 
world of difference whether it is done in the next week or whether it 
is done in the early part of next year. The Budget Committee chairman 
from North Dakota continues to say we won't have the money next year. I 
don't see any reason why we don't have as much money in February as we 
do in December. There won't be a new budget by that time. Things will 
not have changed. If we could do a better job by having a little more 
time to work on it, I favor that. If we can get the job done in the 
short while and have the opportunity to make the changes, have the 
opportunity to examine the contents of the bill--which, frankly, most 
of us have not even had, and we are on the committee--then that is the 
need that we must have.
  I look forward to us moving forward and accomplishing those things. I 
do hope that we do set our priorities on timing and do not move into 
this question of trying to do everything. That is always a problem at 
the end of a session. Everything that has not been done up to that 
time, regardless of the reason it has not been done, suddenly becomes 
the most important action that could ever occur and has to be done in 
the last few days. We have had enough experience of knowing that many 
times those things don't turn out as well as they should.
  I am hopeful we will deal with these things with as much time and 
knowledge and opportunity to participate as possible.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.




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