Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, many of us have noticed that fuel prices are approaching $2 per gallon. We have doubled petroleum imports from Iraq in the last couple of months. This has been due largely to the Venezuelan crisis. We are currently averaging 6 billion barrels a year of imported fuel from Iraq. As anyone might suppose, we may eventually lose that supply. Nearly 60 percent of all oil is from foreign sources, and this should grow to roughly 70 percent by the year 2020.

Recently the gentleman from Minnesota (Mr. Peterson) and I have introduced H.R. 837 which would, partially at least, address this problem.

H.R. 837 amends section 211 of the Clean Air Act. It requires the use of at least 2.3 billion gallons of renewable fuels during the year 2004, and that would increase to 5 billion gallons by the year 2012.

Renewable fuels are fuels produced from grain, sewage, feedlot waste, or other decaying organic materials. Ethanol and biodiesel are the two primary sources of renewable fuels.

Ethanol contains 34 percent more energy than is required to produce it. This combats the myth that many people think it takes more energy to produce ethanol than ethanol actually produces. That is not true.

Ethanol improves octane level in fuels. It improves air quality and allows us to meet EPA clean air requirements. And, possibly as important as anything, it replaces the additive

MTBE, which has been proven to pollute groundwater and is being phased out throughout the Nation. Of course, our legislation requires MTBE to be phased out over the next 4 years. Ethanol results in by-products of animal feed and biodegradable plastics, which certainly adds value to the agricultural community.

This legislation, H.R. 837, would replace nearly all of the oil that we currently import from Iraq by the year 2012, which is roughly 6 billion gallons per year. It would also reduce foreign oil purchases by $34 billion a year. Currently, roughly 25 percent of the trade imbalance that we have is caused by the purchase of foreign petroleum. So this is an important thing.

Also this legislation would create 200,000 new jobs in the United States, it would increase farm income by roughly $6 billion annually and lessen our dependence on farm program payments. Ethanol currently comprises 1 percent of U.S. fuel supply. H.R. 837 would increase the use of ethanol to at least 3 percent by the year 2012. Currently, by contrast, Brazil has 22 percent of its fuel supply from ethanol.

Most automobiles can burn ethanol fuel at an 85 percent level. Currently there are over 200 State and Federal automobile fleets that use a biodiesel blend of 20 percent. So a 3 percent usage of ethanol is just the tip of the iceberg. We certainly can go much further with this particular technology.

Ethanol production is expanding rapidly. We had 12 new plants come into production last year. We have 10 new plants under construction this year, and many plants that are expanding. Eighty percent of California's reformulated gasoline contains ethanol at the present time. Many people thought at one time that the ethanol production was not such that California could be satisfied, so supply is really not a problem at the present time.

Mr. Speaker, this legislation provides flexibility in compliance with oxygenated fuel standards at the State and local level. This is not a mandate that is going to restrict anybody unnecessarily. This should cut refinery costs when compared to current fuel regulations.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support H.R. 837, because it decreases dependence on foreign oil while improving air quality, lessening groundwater pollution, improving farm income and providing hundreds of thousands of jobs for American citizens.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to rise in support of H.R. 4. I think that H.R. 4 addresses some of the issues that have become increasingly problematic to our young people, and I observed some of these problems in over 36 years of coaching.

Back in 1960 when I started out, roughly 5 percent of our athletes came from broken homes. Today, roughly one half of our marriages end in divorce. Fifty percent of our young people spend part or all of their childhood without both biological parents. So as time went on, I began to see more and more young men that I was working with carry a lot of emotional baggage, having their lives disrupted in various ways. Currently, we have 18 million fatherless children in our country, and when their dads do not care enough to stick around and see what they look like, they have a vacuum in their lives and they try to fill that vacuum with all the wrong stuff, gangs, drugs, promiscuity, and so on. So one of the aspects of H.R. 4 that I think is particularly important is the healthy marriage program. An example that happened in my district recently was a young couple who were pretty much thrown out of both houses, their homes, and an older couple mentored them and made a tremendous difference. So we think this is very important and certainly support H.R. 4.

Mr. Speaker, I rise to speak in concurrence with House Resolution 26.

I think most of us realize the excellence of private schools, particularly the Catholic schools around the country that are internationally acclaimed for their academic excellence and provide students more than a superior scholastic education because they are very interested in value-added education, emphasizing a lifelong dedication to moral, intellectual, physical, and social values in America's young people. Certainly in our society today, a strong sense of values and character is critical.

As has been mentioned previously, the total Catholic school student enrollment for the 2001-2002 academic year is over 2.6 million; and of course the student-teacher ratio is critical in any educational setting, and a ratio of 17 to 1 is truly admirable and does provide for a much better academic environment.

Catholic schools teach a diverse group of students. Roughly one- fourth of the students who enrolled in Catholic schools are minorities, and more than 13 percent are non-Catholics.

We feel that the Catholic schools of the United States provide a tremendous service to all people who are interested in education and would like to commend them, and I urge support of House Resolution 26.

Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 25) supporting efforts to promote greater awareness of the need for youth mentors and increased involvement with youth through mentoring.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks on House Resolution 25.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, not long ago I read the results of a study that was done on the Fullerton County Public Schools in

1940, and in this study the teachers in the Fullerton schools were asked what their main concerns were. The list read like this: Number one concern was talking in class; number two was chewing gum in school; number three was getting out of turn in line when you went from one class to another; and number four was not putting waste in the wastepaper baskets.

More recently someone went back to the Fullerton public schools and asked the same question; what was the main concern that the teachers had. The list had changed somewhat. The number one concern was drug and alcohol abuse; secondly was gangs; and then followed weapons, teenage pregnancy, teenage suicide, and violence.

I guess this study, as I saw it, Mr. Speaker, resonated with my own experience of 40 years working with young people, because when I first started working with young people in about 1960, the out-of-wedlock birth rate was roughly 5 percent; today it is 33 percent. We have 18 million fatherless young people in our country today. Most of them have not even seen their father or met them.

In 1960, a relatively small percent of our young people were living in homes without both biological parents. Today, almost half live in homes without both biological parents. Drug abuse and gangs remained relatively unheard of in 1960. Today, as everyone knows, they are a major problem in this country. We have become the most violent Nation in the world for teenage homicides and suicide.

So I guess the question begs itself, Mr. Speaker, as to where we are headed as a Nation. I think if we examine the data on a year-to-year basis, it is a little hard to tell where we are moving, but if we look at it in 40- to 50-year increments, 1940 versus 2003, we can see some alarming trends.

So the question is, Mr. Speaker, what do we do at this point? What can we do? We cannot legislate families staying together. We cannot legislate strong values. But one thing we can do, Mr. Speaker, is we can provide mentoring for young people. A mentoring relationship is a one-to-one relationship with a positive adult role model who, number one, cares unconditionally about a young person.

It is very powerful for a young person in a school when an adult, who is not a parent, not a grandparent, not a teacher, not a preacher, has no axe to grind, but simply cares enough about that young person to show up and spend time with that young person every week.

Secondly, a mentor is one who affirms. A tremendous number of our young people today are growing up without affirmation. Whether it be at home or at school with their peers, no one is saying, I really approve of you, I believe in you, I know you can do this, you can accomplish something. And essentially that is what a mentor does. They are someone who affirms and sees something in a young person that that young person may not even know they have within themselves.

Thirdly, I think a mentor is one who provides a vision. So many young people today simply have no role model in their lives. They dropped out of school early, are working at a minimum paying job and have no great aspirations. Many times a mentor can see something in a young person that points in a direction that certainly is much more productive than that.

Mr. Speaker, mentoring works. Research studies indicate that mentoring reduces drug and alcohol abuse by a great deal, sometimes as much as 50 percent. It reduces teenage pregnancy, teenage violence, and gang membership. It improves peer and family relationships, self- confidence, school attendance, grades and graduation rates. It is estimated that currently 17 million children need a mentor in our society today, and less than 1 million have that experience.

The mentoring initiative is critical to our Nation's well-being. I think most of the great nations of the world that have fallen apart have disassembled from within. I think we need to address the problem what is going on with our young people, and mentoring does this. I hope that this body supports mentoring programs as we recognize National Mentoring Month.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), the chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, whose support for mentoring has been very much appreciated.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Delaware (Mr. Castle), who is chairman of the Subcommittee on Education Reform and also a strong supporter of mentoring.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman's support of this resolution, and I might just mention there was a Mentoring for Success amendment that was added to H.R. 1, which provided for mentoring grants and programs around the Nation. It was interesting to note that we had over 1,300 applications for less than 300 grants. Obviously, there is great interest in mentoring around the country. We know that those monies will be put to good use, that thousands of young people will benefit; and above all, I believe it is important that we remember that this provides a national clearinghouse where we can evaluate all kinds of mentoring, what works and what does not work, and provide a central clearinghouse that we think will be very important.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I sat here with a great deal of interest listening to the previous speakers and the fact that Republicans were at cocktail parties and out with lobbyists, and I am a Republican and I am still here. I was very interested in the comments that I was listening to. I am not a very partisan person. I believe very much in fairness and balance. When I heard the President's economic stimulus package characterized over and over again as another round of tax breaks for the rich, what I was surprised that somebody did not answer was that part of the plan is $3.6 billion going to the States that are to be distributed in $3,000 increments to the unemployed as they pay for transportation and child care and training to get back into the workforce.

Now, the unemployed are not by definition wealthy people. So that $3.6 billion does not go to the rich. The child tax credit increases by $400 per child. Now, not all children, certainly in the United States, are born to the wealthy. So a family of three would have $1,200 additional money in their pocket, and many of those families will be poor families. The marriage tax penalty has been accelerated. For the average married couple, that will mean $1,716 that they will receive. Certainly, not all married couples in the United States are wealthy. Many that I know are not wealthy at all. Mr. Speaker, 92 million tax filers this year will receive an average tax cut of $1,083. We certainly do not have 92 million tax filers in the United States this year that are wealthy people.

Finally, let me just say this. There has been a lot of mention of the dividends and how the dividends were tax breaks for the rich. But what most people do not seem to bother to mention is that roughly 40 percent of the American population now owns stock. Not all of those 40 percent are wealthy people. Many average wage-earners own stock and will benefit from any stock dividend reduction.

So just in the interest of fairness, Mr. Speaker, I thought we might mention the fact that there were some things that were not mentioned here

this evening as we talked about the stimulus package, and I am not for sure what it is going to look like. I am not sure how it is going to play out. But I do know that it is not targeted only for the upper 5 percent or only the upper 10 percent of taxpayers. Certainly a good number of people will benefit.

But that is not what I am here for tonight, Mr. Speaker; it is not why I came over here. From the previous discussion, one can assume that what happens on this floor much of the time is aimed at discussion of the economy, tax breaks have been mentioned, a lot of discussion about Medicare at times, and certainly the Middle East, what is going on in Iraq, what is going on in North Korea. And these are all very, very important subjects. But the subject that we very seldom discuss here is somewhat amazing to me and that is something that is going on right here, right now in the United States; and it involves almost one-half of the country, and that is the drought. We almost never hear that discussed on the floor of this House. We almost never hear it discussed in our major metropolitan areas or in our major metropolitan newspapers.

So, Mr. Speaker, here is the map of the drought. This is what it looks like. In August of 2002, at the end of the growing season, this is what the drought looked like, and this was the impact that it had on our crops in 2002. So what that means, if one looks at the black area, that is exceptional drought; and those areas experienced, for the most part, drought that exceeded any records that go back over 100 years of recorded history of precipitation.

So we see large areas like this. The red areas would, for the most part, exceed the drought that we experienced in the thirties, the Dust Bowl, where tons and tons of Earth were blown away and crops were totally nonviable; and thousands and thousands of farmers left farming and ranching.

So we can see, Mr. Speaker, that this is a rather drastic picture. The bad thing is, it has not improved for the most part. In some areas, it is much worse now than it was then. In my home State of Nebraska, the month of December which just passed was in most cases the driest December ever recorded, so things have not improved at all.

Let us talk a little bit about why this is. Why do we not hear about this more? The reason is, I believe, that there are roughly 2 million farmers and ranchers in the United States today. That comprises a little bit less, actually, than 1 percent of the total population of the United States in farming and ranching. Probably in this drought area we have about one-half of the farmers and ranchers in our country, so we are talking about one-half of 1 percent that are directly impacted by this. Their way of living, their livelihood, is impacted by the drought. One-half of 1 percent sometimes does not make much of a ripple.

Mr. Speaker, that is why I have decided not to go to the cocktail parties and not to go out with the lobbyists tonight, as we have heard earlier was happening with the Republicans. That is why I am here on the floor tonight to talk about this, because very few other people are talking about it. It is something we need to look at because it has huge implications for this country, and for its economy and for its well-being.

Let me talk a little bit about the effects of the drought. Some of these areas are forest lands in Wyoming and in Colorado. One thing that was interesting, in examining the rings, the growth rings on the trees, we can pretty much tell when the droughts occurred. Some of those trees are 300 years old. 2002 was the driest year in many of those areas in the last 300 years. The timber in those forests was drier than the lumber in the lumberyard that had been put through a kiln, so that shows the impact that the drought had on our forests and on our lands.

The reservoirs in these areas that are stored primarily for irrigation are at this time 25, 30 percent, in some cases as low as 15 or 20 percent, full. The bad thing, Mr. Speaker, is that the inflows into those reservoirs are greatly reduced from other years. The snowpack even for this winter is way, way below normal, so there is almost no chance of any great recovery this year. So we are looking at some really reduced irrigation waters for those people who irrigate out of those reservoirs.

Normally, an irrigator could count on somewhere between 90 and 100 days of water. This year, many of those irrigators have already been told that those reservoirs will only provide maybe 20 to 30 days of water, which means essentially that they cannot plant, because they cannot grow anything on 20 to 30 days of water.

Also, many people who would receive normally 20 to 24 inches of water out of a reservoir this year are going to receive 2 or 3 inches of water; so again, those people are having to convert to dry land. They are having to put their irrigated land into pastures and other types of products, and as a result there is a tremendous financial loss in those areas. The pastures in these areas have simply dried up, so there is no hay. There is nothing for the cattle to eat. As a result, what has happened is a great many of our ranchers have had to sell at least part, and in some cases nearly all, of their cattle.

The problem with that is that when we start reducing the breeding stock, and some of these breeding stocks have been put up over generations and of course have tremendous value, but when they can no longer provide food for them and they have to sell the breeding stock, then it is not long before the whole thing unravels, and it will take 5, 6, 7, or 8 years to rebuild the breeding stock. There has been tremendous devastation in these areas, particularly in the livestock industry.

On top of the farmers and ranchers, we also find that the small towns that really service those farmers and ranchers are in bad shape, too, because the implement dealers, the feed and seed dealers, have no money. The merchants, the bankers, all of these people are experiencing extreme hardship in these areas.

Currently, just in my State alone, the State of Nebraska, the economic devastation of this particular drought is estimated to be $1.4 billion. That was as of September or October. My estimation is it will probably go closer to $2 billion. If we multiply that by Kansas, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, all of these other States, we are talking about a disaster in the range of 15 to $20 billion. This is huge for this part of the country, and it is something that we need to think about and we need to do something about.

In Nebraska, the nonrenewable farm loans this year will increase by roughly 400 percent which, if that plays out, and I believe that it will, we will probably lose somewhere between 3,000 and 4,000 farmers.

The most terrifying statistic that we heard recently that the bankers gave me was that 25 to 50 percent of the farm loans in the State of Nebraska are in serious trouble, and they could not endure another 2002. They would go under if we do not do any better; and, of course, the drought appears to be as bad in the coming year as it was in the past year, which would mean that we could lose as many as 15,000 to 20,000 farmers that would not be able to renew their farm loans.

So this is a very difficult prospect. It is something that is, I believe, unconscionable to not address. This is something that has to be done.

What has been done so far to combat the drought? I think, in fairness to the administration, we need to point out the fact that they did provide $752 million in livestock compensation this past fall. This was taken out of section 32 of USDA. It did not require an act or any initiative here in the Congress, but it was done administratively. This money was greatly appreciated.

There was also a livestock feed program that allowed ranchers to get vouchers to go down to feed stores and they could purchase some feed. Some people purchased their hay up on the Canadian border, and said that might help get them through the winter; so it was some help, but it is something that was maybe just a stopgap measure. The people in the ranching business are still in great difficulty; and the bottom line is that nothing so far has been done for the row crops, the people who grow wheat and corn and milo and soybeans. They have not received any type of aid at all.

So let us take a look at what has been going on in terms of disaster. We

see that for Hurricane Andrew and a typhoon $6.4 billion were spent by the United States Government; for the 1997 flood of a river, $738 million. These, of course, are not due to drought.

We every year give $5.59 billion to Israel, $3.94 billion to Egypt, and we give to many, many other countries where we are certainly concerned about their welfare. I certainly do not begrudge the money given to Israel or Egypt or whatever, but the interesting thing is that we do these things, and yet we seem to be at the present time turning our backs on a large segment of the United States, which is a little bit difficult to understand at this point.

We say, now, why would we do this? Why do we turn our backs on our own people? A memo from the budget office said that a drought really is not like a natural disaster such as a flood or a tornado or a hurricane because a drought comes on more slowly. Since it comes on more slowly, then people have a chance to adjust; so they said a drought really is not something like other disasters that get disaster aid. It does not quite qualify. This was what somebody in the budget office wrote.

I would have to believe that that person maybe had not been in agriculture, had not been on a farm, did not know much about it. We have the input costs to till the soil, buy a tractor, plant the seed; we have to fertilize; and after you have spent thousands of dollars to get the crop ready, then if you do not get any water, it may only take about 3 weeks at the right time and you lose the whole crop.

So to say it does not come on suddenly, it may not be 15 minutes or 1 day, but it does not take very long. We have had huge numbers of people out there who have simply lost their whole crop, it has occurred fairly quickly, and it was beyond their control. There was nothing that they could do about it.

The other thing that I think has caused us to not come forward with any disaster aid has been the perception of the new farm bill that was passed last year. People would say, how in the world would that affect whether we had disaster aid or not? The perception of the new farm bill is that it has a huge amount of money in it; and because there is so much money in the farm bill, then that should take care of whatever disaster we might have.

I would say that that perception is not accurate. I would like to show the Members some information here that I think pretty much illustrates this.

In the last 3 years with the Freedom to Farm, the previous farm bill, we spent on average in 1999, in 2000, and 2001 $24.5 billion, $24.5 billion. The new farm bill that was passed this last year is projected to cost a little less than $21 billion in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005, so actually there will be less money spent in the new farm bill than there was in the last 3 years of the old farm bill. So it does not seem to be quite as expensive as what we would have been led to believe.

Now, the reason that the farm bill I think has gotten such a bad rap is that many of the urban newspapers really went after the President for signing the farm bill. I will read just a few of the editorial comments that we saw.

First of all, in the Las Vegas Review Journal the headline was ``Farm Welfare.'' The editorial said, ``The House voted to slide backwards some 70 years, choosing socialism and abandoning market-based reforms in the Nation's Stalinesque farm policy in voting for a new farm bill.''

The Washington Post, the headline was, ``Cringe for Mr. Bush.'' The editorial ran: ``Mr. Bush signed a farm bill that represents a low point in his presidency, a wasteful corporate welfare measure that penalizes taxpayers and the world's poorest people in order to bribe a few voters.'' So the President took a tremendous beating here.

In the Wall Street Journal, the headline was, ``The Farm State Pig- out.'' The editorial said, ``That great rooting, snooting noise you hear in the distance, dear taxpayers, is the sound of election year farm State politics rolling out of the U.S. Congress. This alone amounts to one of the greatest urban-to-rural transfers of wealth in history, a sort of Farm Belt Great Society.''

So it is only natural that the administration, after enduring this type of reaction, would say that they are very reluctant to step forward at this point with any further spending for agriculture. The thing we need to understand, however, is that some of the emergency payments that were paid to agriculture in 1999, 2000, and 2001 were paid out because of low prices. The prices were very low, so to keep farmers in business some emergency payments were given.

For instance, the price of corn during this period, a bushel of corn, probably averaged about $1.70, $1.80 a bushel. The cost of production was around $2.20 a bushel, so in order to keep people in business some emergency payments were made. We are not talking about emergency payments anymore. We are not talking about that; we are talking about a natural disaster. So this is not because of low prices.

The next thing we will look at here is what has happened this year. This is the projection, the new farm bill for 2002, roughly $19 billion. Let us see what has actually happened this year with the drought.

What has actually happened, Mr. Speaker, is that the $19 billion projected spending has not occurred. Instead, this year the farm bill will cost somewhere between $13 billion and $14 billion, a $5 billion to $6 billion shortfall. In other words, in the year 2002, we will actually spend about one-half of what we spent on average on the farm bill in 1999, 2000, and 2001; and yet this is being called the great farm State pig-out, that this is a fat bill. Obviously that is not true. We are spending roughly one-half of what we spent in the last 3 years of Freedom to Farm.

We will say, why did this happen? How could it have happened? What happened was the drought. What happened was that in corn production, in soybeans, in milo, in rye we are down about 10 or 15 percent because of the drought. Some people simply had no crops. When we have less supply, then the price goes up. When the price goes up, we have no farm supports. When people in Iowa, in Illinois, in Indiana have good crops and they have better prices, they get no farm payments because their prices are up. So as a result, ``we'' are saving, in quotes, we the government, somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 billion on this farm bill.

So the question would be, well, why would we not give some of that $6 billion back to the people who caused it to happen in the first place, the people who had no crops, the people who experienced the drought? Because you get no farm payments if you do not have a crop. And that is what happened to these people. They have no crop. And so it would make sense to a lot of people that, yes, we would return some of that. But again we do not seem to be getting any movement in any direction. And the staple answer we get is, well, there is so much money in the farm bill, just take it out of the farm bill.

Now, the problem that we have with that as we looked at the map, we can see that there was only part of the country that had the drought. And so we would have to convince the folks in Iowa, in Illinois, in Indiana, in Minnesota, in Texas, in Arkansas and Louisiana that they should take payment from their crops to give to South Dakota and North Dakota and Nebraska and Kansas and Colorado, and it seems that that is rather difficult to get done. People just do not seem to want to do that.

So what has happened is we are between a rock and a hard place. We cannot seem to get the administration to say, yes, we will help the farmers; and we cannot get many people saying, yes, we ought to go into the farm bill, and I can see that too. So as a result we have a lot of people who are hurting, who are in bad shape; and I really do not know exactly what we are going to do at the present time.

Let us talk a little bit more about the farm bill. This thing is greatly misunderstood. People do not understand why we have a farm bill. And so I would like to present one last graphic here, Mr. Speaker, and this is rationale as I see it for why we have a farm bill.

Farming is a little bit different than most other industries. People who have WallMart come in their community and the hardware store goes broke, they say, nobody helps me. I used to be a football coach and if I lost a game nobody protected me and so they say, why should we help the farmers? Let

me tell you a little bit of the rationale that holds up very well.

First of all, farming is almost totally weather dependent. Now, most industries, most businesses in our country do not dissolve if you have a 15-minute hailstorm or if it does not rain for 3 weeks or if a strong wind comes through and knocks the wheat down. It does not happen that way, but farming is totally weather dependent.

Number two, in farming it is almost impossible to control the inventory. You say, well, what does that mean? Well, if General Motors has too many automobiles out there and they feel there is a glut what they do is shut down an assembly line and they wait until things get in balance. But when you are growing wheat around the world, you really cannot say, well, Australia, you do not plant this year or, Canada, you cut down because you do not know what the worldwide production will be. You do not know where the droughts are going to be. You do not know what is going to happen so you cannot control the inventory. Now most businesses can control the inventory.

Thirdly, producers do not set the price. If you are going to make a suit of clothes you will say, this is worth $500. This is what we will price it at. We will make a box of corn flakes. It will be $2.50. If we are going to sell a car it will be $30,000. So the manufacturer, the producer sets the price. But in farming the farmer does not set the price. The price is set for him. It is the local elevator, the Chicago Board of Trade that says corn is worth $1.60 a bushel this week, so much a pound for beef. And he has no choice. He does not set the price.

Fourthly, farming is critical to national security. As long as you can go down to the grocery store and things are convenient and easy and there is plenty there, and you only spend an average of 9 percent of your income on food you do not really see a problem. There is no problem with national security. But those countries that experienced a shortage of food in World War II have a little bit different slant on things. And the other thing that we want to point out here in regard to national security, somebody mentioned in the previous hour, they were talking about petroleum, our dependence on OPEC for oil. Well, what happened was about 20 years ago we found that we could buy petroleum from OPEC for like $15, $20 a barrel. So we said that is a good deal. So we should shut down our own exploration. We shut down our own refineries. As a result we are now 60 percent dependent so foreign.

People say that is still okay because we only pay $12 to $15 a barrel. That is no problem. But some economists have put a pencil to it and said the Gulf War cost us a lot of money, and the Gulf War was about oil. And we are maintaining a fleet and a military presence in the Middle East and we are now maintaining an even bigger presence which is due largely to oil. And what economists have said was that oil really does not cost us $15 a barrel. What it cost was more like $70 to $100 a barrel when you add it all in.

Now, we can do the same thing to our agriculture. We can very quickly ship our agriculture to South America, to Australia, to Canada. And so the question is are we going to protect agriculture and are we going to keep it in the United States where we know what we have, and we have a secure food supply, and no matter what happens around the world we know we have got it here. Is that worth something to us? I think it is.

Fifthly, there is no level playing field worldwide. The European Union subsidizes agriculture by more than $300 per acre. Now, again, you go back to toward World War II and most people in Europe understand the value of a food supply so they subsidize $300 per acre. Japan subsidizes agriculture more than $1,000 per acre. In the United States, get this, the United States, that fat farm state pig out farm bill subsidizes agriculture $45 per acre, roughly one-sixth of what the European Union subsidizes their farmers.

The other thing to remember is that there is great competition from South America. In Brazil, for instance, a top grade of land will cost $250 per acre, land that would probably cost $2,500 an acre here in the United States. Labor costs an average of 50 cents an hour in Brazil. It would probably cost $10 an hour in the United States. And there are practically no environmental regulations in Brazil where we have a great many.

So what we are saying is that the farm bill is necessary to enable our agriculture to be somewhat competitive and we think we are getting a pretty good bargain here at $45 per acre. And so is that agriculture worth saving? Is that worth some type of investment in terms of disaster payment to keep that here, to keep it in the United States, to keep these people viable? I guess my slant, Mr. Speaker, is, yes, it is. And so that is pretty much my rationale this evening.

I guess one last comment, some people would say, well, we do not have any disaster aid because, number one, the drought is not a natural disaster; and of course I think I pretty well disputed that. Secondly, they have said the farm bill is too fat; and again I think we have offered some information to dispute that.

But the third argument is this, that, well, that those people who have row crops have crop insurance so they do not need any help. Well, I think people in the United States need to understand the crop insurance program is viable and it is very important. It works very well if you have three or four good years, good yields and good production, and then all of the sudden you have a drought for 1 year and maybe then you have 3 or 4 more good years because the crop insurance will at least hold you in there. It will get the input costs back, because the most insurance you can buy for crop insurance is 85 percent. Now, profitability is in the last 10 percent. So on crop insurance you do not make money. You probably still lose a little bit. But the problem is that when you have multiple years of drought, which we have had. Most of these farmers have experienced at least 2, 3, 4, some of them 5 years of drought. Every year of drought that you have the amount of insurance you can buy goes down because you have to average in those years where you had no production.

So probably most of the farmers in those drought areas are insured at a 60, 65 percent level and they have been receiving that now for 2 and 3 years. So they have been digging into their equity every year and some of them are to the point where they no longer have any equity left. So insurance is good for a 1-year situation, but when you have multiple years of drought which we have had, you have a disaster. And so that is where I believe at this point we need to step in.

So we hope very much that this body, in the House, we hope in the Senate and we hope that the administration will begin to see what we are up against and the difficulty of the situation. We hope this will be treated like a natural disaster, like a hurricane, like a flood, like a fire. And typically the United States has stepped forward in those situations, and it is difficult to stand back and see a lack of responses in this case.

Mr. Speaker, I appreciate this opportunity.