MR. WATSON: I'm going to be very brief. I do appreciate the opportunity to be here with this distinguished panel and the distinguished host. I'm Anthony Watson, Jr., Executive Broker of National Juice Products Association headquartered in Tampa, Florida. From the name National you might think it's just a U.S. organization but we have members all over the U.S. and Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Chili, Argentina and I can go on.

NJPA is a trade association whose membership consists of major -- and I mean most of the major U.S. packers and distributors of fruit and vegetable juices and juice beverages. In the interest of brevity I'm going to say it short and sweet. NJPA opposes the reduction of tariffs on orange, grapefruit, pineapple, lemon and grape juices during the next Round of trade negotiations.

Again, in the interest of brevity, because orange has been covered here today, and I would focus primarily on oranges because of the venue here, we will submit more detailed written comments prior to the July 27th deadline. Thank you for the opportunity.

MR. KELLY: Thank you. We have a question.

MR. WATSON: Yes, you may.

MS. HOWES: I was going to ask if you -- you oppose the reduction of our tariffs but a reduction in tariffs in other countries on these commodities?

MR. WATSON: Oh, we would be in favor of reduction in other countries, but I think if you leave things the way they are the equilibrium that now exists for U.S. processors will be maintained. In other words, our members rely on imported concentrate for any number of reasons. I mean you could look at a freeze in Florida. That was one reason we didn't oppose or we were opposed to the dumping order that was sought several years ago by Florida Citrus Mutual. We were on opposite sides of it.

We actually felt it benefitted our processor members to have the solids available to maintain the market during a time of short supply in Florida. So I agree with you. All of these issues are very complex, but we believe that at the present time there is an equilibrium that exists that permits us to get quality fresh fruit supplies for processing from domestic sources, while at the same time being able to import concentrate from foreign countries when that is necessary.

MR. KELLY: Yes, sir.

MR. BAAS: I probably shouldn't ask this question because I don't want to get you killed, but I don't understand if you're a juice products processing organization or company why you wouldn't want the tariff on citrus to simply -- U.S. tariffs on citrus to go away since that will give you presumably a cheaper product from overseas. I understand -- I'm just asking a very narrow question. I understand there are reasons --

MR. WATSON: Well, I think it assumes that elimination of the tariffs would result in reduced price from the foreign suppliers and I don't think one can make that assumption. I'm not sure it's borne out by history.

MR. BAAS: Okay. So you would argue, I guess, that having -- beyond other reasons for having American citrus producers, it's good for the market to have American citrus competitive --

MR. WATSON: Absolutely. In the case of orange, Florida is the second largest producer in the world.

MR. BAAS: Okay. Thanks.

MR. WATSON: Thank you.