Our next speaker then is Minnesota State Representative Ted Winter to be followed by Howard Fleager and then Don Hoggestraat.

MR. WINTER:

Well, as a member of the State House in Minnesota, I’d like to thank you for coming today. And to all the people that have come out to participate, I’d like to thank each and every one of you for being here today to actually stand up and be heard in the name of agriculture and in the name of family farmers in Minnesota and the Midwest. I believe that the plate is pretty full for our negotiators when they go into the trade talks in November. I believe that one of the key parts that needs to be on that plate is agriculture as a -- as a key component. I mean we want a nice divided pie. We just don’t want a little sliver on the side, we’d like to have an equal share of some of the time and some of the intent of those negotiations that our farms and families get treated as fair as possible in the process. I think with the trade barriers, with the subsidies, with the internal and external subsidies that are used in countries around the world and used in this country today, too, that there needs to be some look at how those can be equitably changed in the future. Some of the Uruguay Round talks that people have talked about during the meeting today have brought forward the issue that we got reduction in our subsidies which were much less than the other countries, you know, had to start out with. We are the ones that lost on those issues on the subsidy changes. Our farmers were getting less help, and when we reduced the help in the foreign countries they actually had twice as much help yet left when we got our reduction which hurt and hurts today. As we look at transparency and transparency in the marketplaces I believe is important. The Canadian Wheat Board, the Australian Wheat Board, or whatever is used in the world, needs to have some transparency so we can compete and understand what they’re doing within their countries as far as their trade. We need that in this country, too, nationally between our producers and the corporates that are buying our commodities. We need to know why and how the value is being -- being used. I think one big new piece on the plate is the GMO issue. It’s new on the plate. It’s not been on the plate in the last couple of years, it’s new today. It will be new for the next 15, 20 years. It will be new like hormone beef was new 15 years ago and has not gone away yet today. And we’re going to be using I believe sanctions in the -- in the EU against some of the commodities that they’re shipping over here in order to allow us to have hormone beef to be sold in their country. If they -- if they won’t take the beef, we’re going to sanction products that they’re bringing in here. That don’t make much sense to the people that I know. You use a sanction to get at a sanction. I mean we lose. We lose now because now we don’t only have them mad, because they got to take our beef, but we lose because now we’ve got them mad because we won’t deal with their products besides. It’s a lose/lose for us. It’s not a win/win. When you look at winning in this game, you should use the comment that was brought forward earlier by Mr. Johnson dealing with consumers, consumer-driven markets. And consumer is always the key and first and foremost concern you have to have is how are you going to get them to take the money out of their pocket, out of their billfold and buy your product? If they don’t take the money out and come to you and say, we want to buy your product, you can have all the sanctions in place in the world and they still won’t buy from you. You got to have the incentive. You got to have the market strategy in place that they want to buy, and you got to sell them what they want. If it’s not what they want, they’re not going to buy it. If you want to go buy a Chevy and a Chevrolet dealership wants to sell you a Ford, I mean you’ll go home and not buy that Chevy. And that’s the same thing that we deal with when we look at GMOs and the rest of it. If they don’t want to buy it, we’re not going to shove it down their throat, because they’re not going to take the money out of their pocket to buy it. We need to be smarter. We need to organize our efforts. And maybe we’ll get a dual track. A dual-track negotiations on the issue of what’s on this plate that we need to deal with in a way that if they take some, maybe we can do some other stuff with it. And I know you’re using that whenever you can as far as trying to move our products forward and the rest of that, but we have to more conscious of that. The farmers in this nation have taken money out of their pockets every year and provided for export enhancement, because they do the check off and they paid for all these newfound ways to sell products in China and Japan. We've spent a lot of time, a lot of money out of our pocket to get these markets and try to get our products into those new markets in way that they can buy them, and they like them, and they use them, and then we end up with Monsanto coming with GMOs and puts the clinker into the pot that we spent a lot of my money, and a lot of your money on just trying to get that market opened up. And now it's shut down because of something that we're doing that we should never have been down the road. If they would have told the farmers five years ago that these GMO products they are using wouldn't be able to be sold nationally, it would have cut their export markets down, they probably wouldn't have brought them. Monsanto didn't use that in their marketing technology that they started with. They didn't tell us. They didn't tell me as a farmer, well it you plant this, we may have to cut the exports by five or six percent because they're not going to buy it. They're not going to buy some of the other grains you got. I think that that is some of the problem. We need to equalize some of the subsidies that are out there. Allow farmers to have a chance to compete in the world, but we need to have the protection, I think, that gives the farmers in this country a chance to participate in a value to feed their families and take care of their farming operations, too. And that’s very important as we move forward. And being here today is very important. We really appreciate it. And as Mark Ukert said earlier, if we can help you, if we can work with you, if we can give you some value to -- to your negotiations, be sure that you allow us to participate and give us the value to -- to do in a way that we can help our families and our friends and our farmers and our rural communities. So with that, it’s a pleasure to be here and thanks for coming to Minnesota.

MS. KINNEY:

Ambassador Baas.

AMBASSADOR BAAS:

I would just like to make one comment on hormone beef that you raised and it touches I think on a number of issues that have been raised by a variety of speakers today, sometimes by more than one. We agree with you, retaliation is, in fact, a lose/lose situation. We don’t want to retaliate against the Europeans for not allowing our beef that’s treated with hormones into the European Union. We want access for our beef in the European Union. We want to sell U.S. beef into Europe. But as somebody said here today, we can’t force people to eat what they don’t want to. We can’t force it down their throats if they don’t want it. And I’m sorry to say there are some Ministers of Agriculture or Ministers of Health or Ministers of Consumer Affairs in Europe who say, you know, we’re not having hormone beef in the United States in our country. We don’t care how many studies you do. We don’t care what the science says. We’re not having it. And so what are we left with to do under the WTO? We can retaliate. We tried to pick products that were from countries that were the most difficult on the issue that would hurt countries and that would hurt producers of products who might have some influence, who might be encouraged to change their mind. We did the same thing on bananas, which has already been raised today. On bananas it’s still a little too early, but I think on bananas we’ve got their attention and they are now seriously thinking about how they can modify their banana import regime to make it in the system with the WTO. Once that happens, if we’re happy with it, we’ll take the retaliation off that we put on the products for bananas. We would love to do the same thing on hormones. We would love that we could negotiate a way for our product to enter, perhaps with labels that says USDA choice, you know, beef or some -- maybe even a little bit more. If we could negotiate something, we would love that. Give the consumer the choice, let the consumer decide if he or she wants to pay twice for hormone fed beef or half price for delicious U.S. beef that’s been treated with hormones. Let them choose. So the point is we agree with you and we’re working the issue but, unfortunately, in negotiations it takes two sides, too.