Sugar Symposium Hears Trade, Farm Law, Subsidies Discussed

August 12, 1999

The annual International Sweetener Symposium is being held this week in Napa Valley, CA, and the more than 400 people attending have heard from a host of speakers who have called for dramatic changes in the 1996 farm law, an end to export subsidies, and fair trade.

Rep. Charles Stenholm (D-TX) told he symposium the freedom to farm law passed in 1996 was"risky and foolish." It may have sounded good"philosophically" at the time, he said,"but you can't farm philosophically and still pay your banker."

The trouble with the law, he said, is that it"ignores the reality of the world. It is not working nearly as well as it should. We are spending more for agriculture this year than in the so-called high point of 1986."

Stenholm noted there will be another farm bill crafted in 2002, and it must, among other things, respond to programs implemented by foreign governments in order to protect U.S. agricultural producers."We can't let the world dump price be the price for our farmers," he said.

The ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, Stenholm also said"there is no such thing as free trade in the world today." Sugar and"all of agriculture" needs to be involved in this fall's international trade negotiations to be held in Seattle, WA.

Dean Kleckner, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, told the gathering that export subsidies"must be eliminated" in the upcoming international trade round. He also called for "disciplines on state trading enterprises."

Kleckner also said other countries must live up to their commitments made in previous trade agreements."We've got many nations not doing what they agreed to do," he said. Many of the 135 nations that signed onto the Uruguay Round agreement"are not following what they signed their name to. We have to be extremely careful."

Representatives from both developed and developing nations called for international attention to labor and environmental standards during international trade negotiations. Niels Nordgaard-Andersen of Danisco Sugar, Denmark, said western industrialized countries' production"must be environment friendly." But the developed countries are"in competition with producers paying very low salaries or including even children in their work force," and in many parts of the world, production is less environmentally sound.

"We find it very disappointing that the major producers in newly developed countries are not obliged to fulfill the same commitments as the industrialized part of the world," he added.