JOHN HANSEN: Good afternoon. Welcome to Nebraska. Thank you for coming to Nebraska for these important listening sessions.

For the record, my name is John Hansen. I am the President of the Nebraska Farmers Union, the second largest general farm organization in Nebraska, and on the national level we are the second largest general farm organization in American. I also serve as a member of the President's Agricultural Policy Advisory Committee for Trade.

And as I look at the U.S. position on trade, and I think about where we have come in the efforts for trade liberalization and where we have come in the farm economy, before we prioritize our positions relative to the upcoming round in Seattle, I think we have to stand back and take an honest assessment of where it is we're at in production agriculture. And it is absolutely imperative that we recognize that the transitions that we have made to date in both trade policy and as it has geared and directed farm policy has caused American farmers to be in the worst financial position that we have found ourselves since the great depression.

And that production agriculture is not only facing deep, deep economic prices that unless we change the direction the farm and trade policy, to put more earned income into the pockets of farmers, that we are going to cause widespread economic collapse of the very system of family farmer and rancher, owner-operator agriculture that the United States has used to successfully make us the world's most efficient producer of food and fiber, the most environmentally responsible producer of food and fiber, and the system that has the largest amount of social and political benefits. And so that very system of production agriculture today hangs in jeopardy because of a prolonged period of lack of earned income.

And as we think about our trade position, our focus has been geared towards the short list of the grain and meat processors and how it is they view market distortion and how it is that they view the rules of trade. And so what we have now is a very unfair, inequitable system and a very unfair and inequitable U.S. position in my judgment that gears much too much focus toward high volume kinds of agricultural exports. And we ignore the kind of value that puts earned income in the pockets of farmers first.

So we're helping facilitate the concentration of the ag sector. We're helping force family farmers out of business. And if you look at the overall picture of what it is that we're doing, from an industry standpoint, if you compare where we're at today and where we're likely to be this year as compared to 1996, I look at my June 2nd, 1999 Outlook for U.S. Agricultural Trade, and it tells me that compared to 1996, that exports of agricultural products are likely to be down $9.8 billion while imports are going to be up $4.9 billion and the balance of trade for agriculture products is going to shrink $15.7 billion from 1996.

What is the primary difference between those figures? The difference is value. The difference is that in '96 we had higher values, and today we have lower values. So as we look at the ever shrinking share of the farmers and ranchers' share of the food dollar in domestic food retail, that same problem persists in exporting.

The risk and the benefits of producing for the export market are not fairly or equitably shared in our domestic system. When we win, we don't win at the same rate as do the actual exporters, and when we lose, we're the first to get our nose bloodied, and we're the last one to get fixed up.

So as we look at some of the things I think we ought to look in terms of market distortion relative to the U.S. position in the world economy, I see a need to look for the same things we do in domestic policy and let's look at the impact, the negative impact of market concentration. Let's look at the negative impact and price distortion of capital supply which makes any system of marketing worse but certainly the more noncompetitive the system, the more damage that capital supply does. Let's look at the impact of import and export dumping. Let's look at the impact of being able to disassemble supply management which brings production into alignment with utilization. If we look at the surplus we create now and the non-competitive system that we have, the negative impacts of the farm has been tremendous. And if we're going to get serious of looking at the business of agricultural trade, let's put that on the table which has more to do with the total agriculture production than any other single issue and is not now on the table and that is, how we develop effective and fair coping mechanism to equalize the differential in the relative value of currency.

Thank you very much.