MS. HEBBARD: Hi. My name is Cindy Hebbard. I have been a small business owner for 20 years in the Boston area. I speak  today as a concerned parent. And I am currently a medicinal herbalist and wholistic health advocate.

Free trade policy and philosophy of globalization, which USDA supports in its policy initiatives, seems to be a product of unbridled greed and it alarms me that still in the face of opposition, not just in the U.S. but worldwide, it's considered beneficial. Free trade is a corporate agenda, not a people agenda. It's based on the ideas of consumerism, acquisition and limitless big business growth, an impossibility in a world of finite resources.

Free trade has led to American companies moving factories abroad and to the ruinous structural adjustment policies imposed on third world countries. It has led to the lowering of inflation and environmental standards and the catastrohpic introduction of genetically altered foods, RBGM in our milk and the USDA opposition to strict organic standards and the government backing of food irradiation.

We do not need food -- excuse me -- we do not need free trade and more imports. What we need is a stronger local and regional economy throughout the world, which policies you've indicated with common industry helping to subvert. Even free trade economists responsible for the policy of reduced government intervention have now admitted that they were wrong.

In January of 1998, Joseph Stiglet, Chief Economist of the World Bank, said, and I quote, "The focus of freeing up financial markets may have had the perverse effect of contributing to macro-economic instability by weakening the financial sector."

On November 24, 1998, Jack McQuady, who is the economic advisor to the GATT talks, appeared at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and explained why the multi- lateral agreement on investment, which would have enshrined it as law, the policies you advocate, was not only a failed document but failed concept. In the course of his talk he uttered this memorable quote, which should be chiselled in stone over the entrance to the USDA, and again I quote, "We must remember that the world did not -- does not exist for business alone."

I believe that a policy -- I believe that our policy and concerns should be a long- term view of preserving our local and world environments, healthy food for all people, and a stable economy for all people of the world, not lining the pockets of the wealthiest corporations.

Thank you.