[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 151 (2005), Part 17]
[House]
[Page 23116]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  WTO NEGOTIATIONS ON U.S. AGRICULTURE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. OSBORNE. Mr. Speaker, at the present time we are conducting some 
talks, WTO negotiations, involving the European Union. I would like to 
call attention to some figures that I think most people are not totally 
aware of.
  First of all, if you compare the United States economy with the 
European Union, the United States economy is $11.7 trillion annually 
and the European Union is $9.4 trillion. So they are pretty comparable. 
The import tariffs we have on goods coming from the European Union into 
the U.S. are 12 percent, and tariffs on U.S. goods going into the 
European Union are 30 percent.
  So we have comparable economies and yet a tremendous disparity in 
tariffs. This led to an agricultural trade deficit of minus $6.3 
billion last year, which was the biggest deficit that we had with any 
entity that we were trading with for agriculture.
  On export subsidies, the European Union provides $3 billion and we 
provide $31.5 million, so they are roughly 100 to 1 on money they spend 
on subsidizing their exports to other countries. As far as farm 
subsidies per acre are concerned, the United States subsidizes 
agriculture at $38 per acre with the European Union at $295 an acre. So 
this is a tremendous discrepancy.
  One other set of data I wish to point out is that we have had two 
cases of BSE, or mad cow disease, in the United States. The European 
Union has had 189,102 in the European Union in the last 10, 15 years. 
Yet the European Union excludes our exports of beef into the European 
Union, our pork, our genetically modified crops, such as corn, and also 
poultry. So we are really having a very difficult time with the 
European Union when you look at all these figures.
  Currently, we are having some preliminary WTO talks where we are 
looking at some ways to try to fix world trade, and I want to point out 
a couple of things.

                              {time}  1715

  First of all, we are proposing that the United States reduce farm 
subsidies 60 percent, which would mean that we would drop our subsidies 
from $19 billion a year to roughly $17.5 billion a year, and at the 
same time we are proposing that the European Union reduce agricultural 
subsidies to 83 percent, which would be a decrease from $80 billion 
down to $15 billion. That is a big drop, but still the European Union 
would be subsidizing double what the United States does. The European 
Union has rejected this offer at the present time.
  I think it is important that people realize what happens in the next 
round of WTO talks will have great implications for the next farm bill 
which will be written in 2007 and go into effect in 2008. We are apt to 
see a move toward conservation types of payments, away from traditional 
types of payment.
  We will have to be concerned about developing countries like Brazil. 
Brazil has land valued at $250 to $500 an acre. They have enough rain 
and topsoil to produce two crops a year. Their labor is 50 cents an 
hour. They can pretty well bury us if we do not provide some subsidy 
for our agriculture.
  Lastly, I would like to issue a warning. We saw what happened to our 
petroleum industry. We found we could buy a barrel of oil from OPEC a 
few years ago for $10 a barrel. We began to get more and more from 
OPEC. Finally, we are pretty well dependent on foreign sources of oil. 
We cannot afford to let this happen to our agricultural economy. 
Certainly changes are in order, but I think it is important we proceed 
cautiously because we do not lose our food supply to foreign sources, 
which would be even more devastating than losing our oil supply to 
sources abroad.

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