Tom Harkin

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. I certainly appreciate the efforts of the distinguished Chairman to fund WIC adequately within the limitations of the bill. However, analysis supporting the Administration's budget request indicates that the amount provided will not be sufficient to maintain WIC participation at the level it is expected to reach at the end of this fiscal year. Because of the success of WIC. I believe it is important to do whatever we can to ensure that WIC participation does not fall for lack of funding. My amendment provides a portion--but much less than all--of the additional appropriation the Administration believes is necessary to avoid a reduction in WIC participation during fiscal 1999.

Mr. HARKIN. I thank the Chairman very much for his cooperation on this amendment and look forward to working with him further on the matter.

Mr. HARKIN. As my colleague, the distinguished Chairman of the Subcommittee may know, I have been advised that the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 (FDAMA) authorized a new streamlined pre-market notification system for food packaging materials. The current regulatory process involves significant delays, resulting in lost sales and decisions not to bring new products to market that would improve food safety and protect the public health. The new notification system will substantially reduce the length of the FDA review process and allow the introduction of advanced packaging materials. The Agency will still, however, receive all of the information needed to establish the safety of packaging materials and will continue to be able to keep unsafe materials off the market. I also have been advised that FDAMA requires that certain funding criteria be met for the program to take effect as scheduled on April 1, 1999. The Act calls for funding of the pre-market notification program at a level of $1.5 million in FY 1999. I note that the counterpart legislation passed by the House Appropriations Committee currently provides for the sum of $500,000. It is my hope that the distinguished Chairman of the Subcommittee will further address this issue in conference in order for the FDA to implement this important reform as intended by Congress.

Mr. HARKIN. Would the distinguished Senator from Mississippi yield for the purpose of engaging in a colloquy with me on an issue of some concern to food packagers and to the general public?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, one other thing. I listened to the comments made by the Senator from Illinois, Senator Durbin, when he very poignantly told the story of the young child who died in Illinois. I just point out again that these outbreaks are growing with rapidity and showing up in the oddest of places. For example, last month, dozens of children got sick--again, with this E. coli 0157H7--in Atlanta after swimming in a public pool. Many of these children spent time on dialysis for kidney failure. This was just last month. Now, the infection they got was the same strain of E. coli that came from a local ground beef recall in an outbreak in Atlanta 2 weeks earlier. So 2 weeks earlier, there was an outbreak of E. coli from a ground beef recall, and now it shows up in a swimming pool 2 weeks later. Children in five States were infected from this ultimately foodborne illness. So it started out as a foodborne illness and then it got into a swimming pool. Dozens of kids got sick and some spent time on kidney dialysis. So that is how virulent some of these strains have become. Not only do they show up in the food, they are so virulent that not even the chlorine in the swimming pool could kill it. Again, Mr. President, I think this amendment deserves widespread support. I point out again that the President asked for $101 million to fully fund his food initiative. I wish we could do it. We should do it. But because of the problem with offsets and points of order and getting 60 votes, we had to look around to find legitimate offsets that we could use. As I said, we found offsets for $66 million. So this brings the funding up to $66 million. It is not up the full $101 million, but it brings it to $68 million. Those offsets, of course, were the money that we got from taking away the Federal Government's subsidizing of tobacco, $15 million from the CCC computer account, and $13 million from the ARS buildings and facilities account. I want to make a couple of things very clear before I close my comments. I have heard some talk around that there is some new enforcement authority here. I want to make it clear that there is no new enforcement authority in my amendment. Secondly, there are no new user fees for the meat industry--not one bit of user fees for the meat industry in this amendment. In the bill now, there is $2.6 million for this Food Safety Initiative. The House only put in $15 million. The President asked for $101 million. The amount that this amendment would increase it to would be $66 million. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. I wonder how many consumers know that only 2 percent of all the produce they eat that comes from outside this country is ever inspected--2 percent. The rest of it, who knows what is on that stuff when it comes to this country. The consumers don't know this. And as the Senator said, it will go up in the future. We will get more and more of that produce from other countries. That is why this is really needed. I thank the Senator for his support and his comments on this. Mr. President, there is an editorial that appeared in today's Los Angeles Times that I was just made aware, calling on us to do something about food safety. Obviously, they probably didn't know about my amendment. But they did say. . . . the U.S. Senate can take a big step to combat food contamination by restoring all or most of the $101-million initiative the Clinton administration has proposed to improve food safety. The money would go to hire new safety inspectors, upgrade technologies, and bring coherence to disjointed oversight. So far, The Senate has allocated only a piddling $2.6 million for the initiative at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and nothing at all at the Food and Drug Administration. The editorial went on to say that we needed more funding. I will quote the last paragraph of the editorial: Food safety is an unassailable cause. There are some things that only government can do, and guaranteeing the wholesomeness of our food supply is one of them. I ask unanimous consent that the editorial from the Los Angeles Times of this morning, Thursday, July 16, 1998, be printed in the Record.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. HARKIN. You are right about E. coli. I counted up in June of this year, this last month, and we had six E. coli outbreaks of food poisoning in this country, of a strain of E. coli that didn't exist 20 years ago. It wasn't there. And now it is here. It is not only making people sick, but killing kids. There are new pathogens that become more virulent. The surveillance systems we have in place and the risk assessment and the other inspection systems we have--the FDA, as the Senator knows, only on average inspects our food processing plants once every 10 years.

Mr. HARKIN. I want to thank the Senator from Massachusetts for his kind words. But more than that, I want to thank him for his efforts through the years to make sure we had a Food and Drug Administration that was on the side of consumers in this country, a strong Food and Drug Administration that made sure that we could have confidence when we went to the drugstore or to the grocery store to get our food, drugs and medicine, that they would indeed be safe. I want to thank the Senator from Massachusetts for his leadership in that area and thank him for his kind and generous support of this amendment. Everything he said is right on mark. It is not just the consumers, I say to my friend from Massachusetts. I earlier had some comments from people representing the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Broiler Council, the National Food Processors Association, all of whom basically said we need better surveillance, we need better risk assessment, we need better education out there. That is what this amendment does. It is the processors, the wholesalers--everyone recognizes that this is a new phenomenon, as the Senator from Massachusetts said, something new we have not experienced in the past. Everyone recognizes the need to get on top of this.

Mr. HARKIN. I want to make it clear for the Record that the Senator from Illinois, Senator Durbin, has been the leader in going after this aspect of the taxpayer funding of tobacco at USDA for years. So I just thank the Senator for letting me capitalize on that and use this money that he has tried so valiantly over the years to stop--to use that for this offset for the Food Safety Initiative. I appreciate the Senator's support and his willingness to let us use the offset that he has been trying to kill for years, because it really is unfair for the taxpayers of this country to spend $60 million every year in support of USDA activities that go to help grow more tobacco in this country. If they want to do it, let the tobacco companies fund it themselves. I thank the Senator for his years on this effort in this regard.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the privilege of the floor during the debate on the agriculture appropriations bill be granted to Sarah Lister, a member of my staff.

Mr. HARKIN. I will get into a discussion with the Senator on this because this amendment--it kind of all wraps up because the Senator from Kentucky also said this shouldn't be on an ag appropriations bill. He also said we should not have a new program. This is not a new program, it is an ongoing program. It is funded under agricultural appropriations because we fund the FDA. That is exactly where we fund the FDA. This amendment doesn't start anything new. It takes an existing program at the FDA and expends the money. That is what an appropriations bill does. We are not legislating on an appropriations bill. There is no legislation here, I say to my friend from Kentucky. We are only increasing the money.

Mr. HARKIN. If the Senator will yield.

Mr. HARKIN. This doesn't do it.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. HARKIN. Will the Senator yield?

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, my cosponsors on this amendment are Senators Leahy, Kennedy, Torricelli, Durbin, Wellstone, Mikulski, and Murray. I want them all added as cosponsors of this amendment.

Mr. HARKIN. I respond again to the Senator from Kentucky that there are other assessments and user fees in this bill. So why should the tobacco companies be exempt from an assessment? There are, I point out, a number of other assessments on industry in this ag appropriations bill. So this is nothing new and startling. Again, we are not reopening the tobacco debate. This amendment was offered last summer, last September, and was voted on, and it carried by a vote of 70 to 28. That amendment raised $34 million. What is different between that amendment and this amendment is, this amendment raises an additional $100 million. I know what the Senator is going to say about the 150. I want to explain that.

Mr. HARKIN. And I will explain why that is.

Mr. HARKIN. The reason it is is because if we put an assessment, I say to the Senator from Kentucky--if we put an assessment on the tobacco companies to pay into this, that assessment they can deduct from their taxes. They deduct it from their taxes. And so in order to score it to get the $100 million that we need to fully fund the FDA youth ID check, we have to assess the $150 million because they get to write that off on their taxes. To get to $150 million, we have to do the $100 million assessment.

Mr. HARKIN

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I have been listening, of course, to the last couple of days of debate. I sympathize with the majority leader and minority leader on the issue of moving ahead with the legislation. I think we should. There are some very important issues here on agriculture. We have a crisis looming for our farmers, ranchers, and our rural economies all over America. Maybe it has not hit with full force and effect yet, as it has in North Dakota, and maybe a couple of other places, but we are on the cusp of it in Iowa. I had an Iowa farmer call me yesterday. The corn price in northwest Iowa is down to $1.89 a bushel, and it is dropping every day. It doesn't look like it is going to get any better. There is nothing out there, nothing out there that is going to do anything between now and harvesttime. I was checking the figures a little bit, with what we had in the 1980s. We had corn priced in the 1980s--about 1985, it was down to $1.50 a bushel, and after that we had a whole wave of foreclosures and farm bankruptcies. Those of us who have been around remember that in the 1980s. The corn price in Iowa is getting down to that same level again, when you consider the increase in the cost of inputs and everything like that. So we are back where we were, right before the wave of foreclosures and bankruptcies in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1988. You would think we would learn from history not to repeat that, not to wait too long before we respond to this crisis. But that looks like what we are going to do here. We are just going to jaw it around and talk about it and not do anything. I had a sense-of-the-Senate resolution a couple of days ago that basically said there is a crisis out there. There are problems out there. There is a sense of the Senate that the President and the Congress should immediately respond to this farm crisis out there. Mr. President, 99 Senators voted for it. Yesterday, we really had a chance to do something about it by lifting the caps on the loan rates, at least for 1 year, and giving farmers more flexibility in being able to market their crops, and giving them 15 months rather than 9 months to pay it back in a marketing loan procedure--which would not leave grain hanging over the market. I heard that debate around here. Obviously, people don't understand marketing loans if they say that. So we had a good debate on that. And we lost, 56 to 43. Not one Member of the Republican side voted for it--not one. Not a single one. Yet the day before they said there was a crisis there and we have to do something about it. Now we have another sense-of-the-Senate resolution by my colleague from Iowa. It has a lot of good language in there. There are a lot of good things we ought to do. Funding IMF, I am all for that; China; capital gains and estate tax reforms, I am all for that. That is good. Oh, yes, the Farm and Ranch Risk Management Act, which allows farmers to have IRAs. That is fine, too. But before you can have an IRA, you have to have some money. They don't have any money. So, while my colleague's sense-of-the-Senate resolution sounds very nice, it doesn't do anything. So, once again, I guess the Senate is going to be the greatest deliberative body in the world. We will deliberate it but we won't do anything. So that is basically what we have here in this resolution. I must say that I have one serious reservation about this amendment the Senator from Iowa offers. It says: Congress should pass and the President should sign S. 1269, which would reauthorize fast-track trading authority for the President; . . . There may be a fast-track bill that I could support, but I cannot support that one. While I might vote for this amendment, I want to be clear on the Record that I do not support S. 1269. I had an amendment to that bill that I thought had a good chance of being adopted if we ever got it on the floor. We never did. But I could never vote for S. 1269 as it is drafted. Some of the other things in here are pretty good. I would say probably about 70 percent of this amendment is pretty good, and 30 percent is not too good. You have to weigh those around here. We can all vote for it. It might make you feel good, but it doesn't do anything. This resolution doesn't do a thing to get the price up for our farmers. Why don't we just have sense-of-the Senate resolutions around here forever, then we won't have to do anything, but it will make you feel good. If you want to feel good, you can go ahead and vote for the Grassley amendment, but I don't think it is going to do one single thing to get the price up for our farmers that is going to help them get through this next year, not one single thing. I yield the floor.

Mr. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.