Marcy Kaptur

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise to pay tribute to Mr. Daniel Brown. For the past three decades he has been a proponent of higher education in northwest Ohio, serving our community as President of Owens Community College. Mr. Brown has been affiliated with Owens since its inception in 1965, serving in various capacities that culminated in his serving the past seventeen years as President. Always a proponent of the student, he has been the watchdog on tuition increases. He proved his commitment to higher education by lowering tuition five percent for the 2000-01 academic year. Through his hard work and dedication, Owens and its Findlay campus have excelled into the fastest growing two-or-four-year college in Ohio. His dedication to students doesn't stop there. Owens has articulation agreements with almost twenty four-year colleges and universities, including Bowling Green State University, Ohio State University, University of Michigan and University of Toledo, allowing a smooth transfer for graduates pursuing bachelor's degrees. The school offers more than 100 technical programs and majors in various fields, such as health, business, industrial and engineering technologies and agriculture, in order to prepare students for careers of the future. With a focus on state-of-the-art facilities, President Brown has expanded the college with such complexes as the Fire Science/Law Enforcement Center and Industrial and Engineering Technologies Building. A new library, audio/visual classroom center, math/science center and student health and activities center have increased the Galleria Complex, a new addition to the old campus. A Fine and Performing Arts Center will round out the construction for this site. Even though growth, both at the physical campus and enrollment, has been exponential during the tenure of Mr. Brown, Owens remains committed to offering small classes, personal attention and flexible class schedules so that each person interested in a higher education will be afforded the opportunity to quality instruction. The efforts of Daniel Brown will be evident for years to come. He has touched the lives of countless individuals and will be remembered with reverence and veneration.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I wish to thank the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the chairman of the full committee, and rise in very strong support of the Obey motion to instruct. Mr. Speaker, I want to specifically address the portion of the motion to instruct that involves the $35 million of the request for the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I would say that if Members have been paying any attention to the newspapers and see what is going on in Europe and in Latin America, they would see the pressures on our Department of Agriculture to keep out of our country these severe animal diseases that are just absolutely devastating both livestock and human lives in places around the world. Our Department has a special new responsibility that they have been trying to augment with this supplementary appropriation bill. They have asked us for this $35 million to hire additional custom inspectors and veterinarians, and to make sure we have a doubling or tripling of our canine force to try to detect animal and disease problems that may be entering our country. This really is, I think, a difficult issue for many Americans, yes hard to understand. Life is pretty comfortable for the majority of people in our country. It is hard to understand that there actually could be such serious threats to our food chain. America has not had foot and mouth disease since 1929. But it spreads rapidly. And it will be devastating if it enters this country. We have seen mad cow disease do its damage to millions of animals and now to humans in Europe. Human beings are dying in Europe, in very developed economies, from this. These are almost, it seems, other-worldly experiences, but they could happen to us. We really need this $35 million to help the USDA. They have asked us for this money, and hopefully with this motion to instruct we will be able to get it. Mr. Speaker, the USDA continues to need the money. The gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Price), who has just been so vigilant on this issue, will be talking about this in a minute. He has another letter from USDA seeking this assistance. We had a vote in the subcommittee, in the full committee, very close, 27 to 35 when I offered it as an amendment. It was defeated on a close margin at that point, but I urge the conferees and I urge this House to consider this motion to instruct. Give us this $35 million the Administration has requested. Keep America free of these exotic pests and serious animal diseases.

Ms. KAPTUR

Ms. KAPTUR. Parliamentary inquiry, Mr. Chairman. We were just presented a list of potential amendments for consideration by the full membership, and I wonder if the Chair would again repeat which amendments the Members will be asked to vote on and the order that they will be presented.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I would inquire of the Chair, I stood up before to ask for additional time as the ranking member of the subcommittee and could not get additional time. I wish to personally speak in favor of the Sanders amendment. Do I understand the procedures here to disallow me, as ranking member, the highest member of my party on this committee, from being allowed to speak on behalf of this amendment? Is there no procedure available to me to use today because of this unrealistic time limitation?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Bonilla) for yielding me this time. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the Royce amendment. I think that the proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is in the trade accounts of the United States, which show that in spite of an unbelievably large trade deficit in almost every other sector, in the agricultural arena we have been able to keep our nose above water barely, because we have exported more than we have imported. With dropping prices for product and so forth, we have managed to double some exports. In specialty areas, whether we are talking about fish or packaged juices, we have been able to keep moving product outside this country. That takes effort. The Market Access Program helps. With changes made in prior farm bills, we have limited those who can apply for assistance in order to move product into the international market; but my goodness I would not want to stand on this floor and oppose a program that has helped America maintain positive trade accounts in agriculture internationally when every other single account in petroleum and imported oil products, in manufactured goods, in electrical equipment, no matter where one goes in the trade accounts, the United States has historic trade deficits but for agriculture. Though the going is getting rougher in international waters in terms of trade, my goodness, this would be the last program one would want to eliminate in terms of helping both farmers in this country move product and in maintaining and turning around that yawning trade deficit which is a very serious underbelly inside this economy. So I rise in opposition to the Royce amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. I thank the Chair very much. Amendment No. 25 Offered by Mr. Weiner

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I thank the chairman very much. It has been a pleasure to work with the gentleman on this bill. We are proceeding expeditiously, in view of the large number of amendments. I am deeply grateful for the gentleman's support. Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Ms. KAPTUR. Then we will move to final passage?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time on this important amendment to increase funding for the elderly food program and to take funds that may be available from rental payments that USDA does not have to make because it no longer is occupying certain facilities. Without question, across our country the costs of even paying utility bills are rising significantly for seniors. Electric bills, gas bills in the Midwest, for example, have just risen at astronomical rates. And any way we can find to help seniors make it through this year and next I think are worthy of consideration. This is certainly one of those at the very basic level of decent nutrition. We know that in many of our senior feeding programs, in fact, the programs are oversubscribed. I have been surprised in my own district on related programs, such as the Seniors Farmers' Market Nutrition Program, where seniors are allowed to use food coupons to purchase fruits, vegetables, herbs and so forth, the enrollment in the program is just growing exponentially because people are pinching every penny because of other expenditures that they have had. So I think we really have to look carefully at any ways we can move food to the seniors' tables, and these particular meals programs operated through our area offices on aging are eminently successful across the country. I know in many cases I have sat in my own district and I have watched seniors being asked to contribute money in little envelopes to help pay for these meals at these senior centers to offset rising costs when they have very little to give anyway. So I would say to the gentleman that I think he has a very worthy amendment this year. He was successful in leading our country last year with a similar amendment to increase funding for the program, and the number of meals, according to the charts that he has provided, have gone up. So it has been successful. Certainly no person in America, no senior in this country should go without decent nutrition. We know that the poorest people in our country are women over the age of 85, and many of them are too weak sometimes to even get to the senior centers, so we have home-delivered meals being taken across our country in various neighborhoods. Sometimes the only contact that that senior has are with the person who delivers the noon meal. So I want to thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Stupak), whose district actually spans the entire northern region of Michigan, who understands the problems of rural isolation of people in poverty and thank him for leading us all. And I am sure that the USDA, within its various accounts, can find the funds to cover the gentleman's proposed expansion, and I just want to compliment the gentleman for doing what is right, what is moral, and what we have the eminent capability to do in this country. Mr. Chairman, I ask our colleagues to support the Stupak amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Baca) for his leadership in bringing this issue to the attention of our subcommittee. The gentleman from California is particularly well suited to sensitizing the Congress for the extra attention that needs to be put to identify those institutions serving higher numbers of Hispanic populations, and to help to place those in a more competitive position with larger and more established institutions that tend to have first call at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, even in their research protocols. Mr. Chairman, I assure the gentleman that he will have my full support in identifying ways to move funding to those institutions to reach a broader array of the American public, and, as with some of the other institutions we were talking about a little bit earlier, particularly those serving African American populations, to look also toward a global role for those institutions because of their inherent bilingual capabilities and the historic ties that exist, certainly with Latin America and other places. So we do not have a narrow view of only one State or even our own country, but we have this tremendous resource in our own country if we but see it and enhance it. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for coming to us and for being the leader in this Congress and for bringing this issue to our attention. California could not have sent a more capable representative here, and the gentleman certainly has my pledge to work with him as we move toward conference to see if we cannot do it better in this new millennium than perhaps some of those who served here in the past.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for proposing this Buy American amendment to this bill as well as many other bills that he has been successful in achieving this added language. I would not only like to support the gentleman on this effort, but to work with him to assure that both the letter and spirit of the law, as the gentleman has been able to pass here regarding Buy American, are working in every program of our government, let me point out, for example, the Department of Defense's purchase of food commodities, should be oriented toward U.S. farmers, U.S. produced commodities, not food brokers that might acquire their product from foreign sources. Mr. Chairman, I just want to commend the gentleman and say I support the Buy American Act, and congratulations to the gentleman for bringing this Buy American amendment to America's attention.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, for all the Members who are watching from their offices, then, in terms of the order of the votes, it would then be?

Ms. KAPTUR. So could I ask unanimous consent, could I plead with the chairman of our subcommittee, to give us 2 additional minutes on each side to fully debate, not even fully debate, to partially debate an amendment of this consequence that would allow the ranking member to at least offer an opinion in favor of this amendment? The vote last year was 363 to 12 in favor of the Crowley-Sanders amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of the Sanders amendment. Again I repeat, last year the vote on this issue passed overwhelmingly 363 to 12 in this House. Indeed the House has spoken. Let no one confuse what the issues are. First of all, drugs are already being brought into this country. People from my district go up to Canada and buy prescription drugs all the time. That is true for people from San Diego going to Tijuana; or New York to Niagra Canada. In fact, most drugs sold here are manufactured in Puerto Rico anyway! They are not even made in the United States, and we require the FDA to inspect those laboratories. So we are not talking about anything different with this amendment. We are talking about expanding an existing system that works and provides the safest drug and food supply in the world. Mr. Chairman, some of my colleagues came up here and said this amendment poses a threat to consumers. The only threat to consumers is that our seniors and others cannot afford to buy the drugs that they need to keep them alive; that is the threat out there! No industry, no industry in this country should be allowed to keep prescription drugs away from people to save their lives. Someone else talked about the effect of this amendment reducing the gold standard of drug inpsection. In fact with this amendment, we want to apply the gold standard of inspection more broadly to make more medications available that are approved by the FDA. Let me say that we even inspect meat plants and license meat plants all around the world when they ship products in here. We can certainly do that more comprehensively for prescription drugs. Finally, let me end by stating that when we went to conference on this important item last year, we offered four amendments to deal with some of the important regulatory questions that were raised by the FDA. We were defeated on a totally partisan vote each time. I will say to the Republican Party in this institution, they caused this amendment to be unworkable. Give us the right with this amendment to fix the system as we tried last year when we went to conference and our four amendments were defeated. Mr. Chairman, we want to provide the safest food and drug supply to the people of this country. Allow us to do that. Again, support the Sanders amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding time to me, and I want to compliment my colleagues, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) and the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio), for bringing this extremely important issue before the full House as we debate this 2002 agriculture appropriations bill. Let me say to the gentleman that I think what is so important about what he has done is he has drawn a line in the sand. He is saying to us that before we cross the line between the green revolution and the genetic revolution, somebody here in Congress had better pay attention that our government is not even properly structured to deal with this significant scientific leap. We are not talking about the marriage of genes between necessarily like species that have mated in nature, or pollinated in nature. But rather, we are addressing the injection of growth hormones into fish that have never mated, producing species that we have never seen the likes of, and nature has never seen the likes of since the dawn of time. From an administrative standpoint, we could ask ourselves, who is in charge of fish, anyway? We cannot even get the government of the United States to inspect fish that is coming over our borders and causing people to get sick across this country. So who is in charge of fish? We have the Commerce Department, with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. We have the Interior Department with the Fish and Wildlife Service. We have the USDA, with the Food Safety Inspection Service. We have the EPA, which issues these advisories such as ``Do not eat fish from Lake Erie but one per week because of mercury levels being too high.'' I can tell the Members this, that we know today that we have half as many fish in our oceans as we did 25 years ago. This diminishment of the natural system of oceanic fish production is a serious international problem. If we think about the dawn of genetic engineering, this is but another transgenic product that we should be concerned about when it is released from containment into the natural environment. We do not know its consequences on the ecosystem, in the same way as we do not know the consequences of transgenically-altered plants in the natural environment. We are ill-equipped as a country to deal with these issues in any intelligent way, so we sort of get into using current unprepared bureaucracies, like FDA, which this amendment addresses. Mr. Chairman, nothing in the gentleman's amendment stops research. But what it does is it says let us take a pause for thought here with the FDA. Let us take a look as a Congress to investigate and authorize the appropriate agency with environmental expertise and clear authority to regulate the impacts of these genetically-engineered fish, wherever that might be. I fully support the amendment and urge adoption of this amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) for yielding time to me. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to publicly acknowledge the incredible work that the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) has done in proposing this amendment along with the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee). Were it not for their vision and leadership last year, we would not have had any increase to these accounts. Without question these colleges and institutes have such an enormous impact in our country, but also can be pivotal institutions for advancement in other countries. I envision the day when these additional dollars will be able to link these institutions to even some of the most underdeveloped areas of Africa. There, I think, cooperative research projects could benefit both nations, the farmers of both nations, the people of both nations. I also want to thank both the gentlewomen from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton) and the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson-Lee) for taking a hard look at the full potential of these historically black colleges and universities and the Tuskegee Institute and the needs of our smaller African American farmers. In supporting this amendment, I am reminded of my travels to one State where there were significant civil rights suits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It was unbelievable to me that loans were not being made to very worthy endeavors by minority farmers for food processing. We run into this age-old problem of discrimination even by some of the local loan committees that still exist across this country. I think that these universities and the Tuskegee Institute and these colleges can help lead America forward in a very important way. They can be of special assistance because of the trust with which they and their researchers are held by the very communities that we want to assist. Mr. Chairman, I would have to say to these two gentlewomen--who really cannot be viewed as only gentle for some of what they have to address in serving at the national level and dealing with some of the issues that we contend with--that they are leading America forward in this new millennium in a way that is so vitally necessary. They certainly have my support in their intentions to increase funding in these categories. Mr. Chairman, I know the gentlewoman wishes to withdraw the amendment at some point, but hopefully as we move toward the Senate, we will be able to take my colleague's excellent recommendations and enact them into law through conference.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, we have witnessed a great debate today about the importation and reimportation of prescription drugs. Yesterday Secretary Thompson finally rendered his decision regarding the fate of the reimportation provision attached to the fiscal year 2001 agriculture appropriation bill. My amendment takes the $2.95 million designated in this bill for costs associated with the reimportation provision and would transfer the funds back to the Food and Drug Administration general account. Clearly, in the wake of the Secretary's decision, the Agency no longer needs the funds for the purposes of reimportation, and my amendment would simply keep those funds within the Agency so they are not penalized to be used for program priorities at the Agency's discretion within such accounts as the prevention of BSE, TSE, mad cow disease and hoof and mouth disease, many of the challenges that are facing our country today. Given its tremendous responsibilities and challenges, FDA needs every resource available to keep our food and drug supply safe. I encourage the membership to vote yes to keep these funds within the Agency.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, will the gentlewoman yield?

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will yield, I would say to the chairman of our subcommittee, very reluctantly, very, very, very reluctantly, very, very, very, very reluctantly, I am going to be forced, because of the rules, to withdraw my amendment to put America on a more renewable energy future. But I would hope that our words today have been heard at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I appreciate the chairman for his indulgence, and I would hope that wisdom will prevail in the days and months ahead.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, in closing this afternoon, let me say that oil ministers of the Middle East should not be put in charge of setting energy prices in the United States of America. We should have that control inside of our border. This amendment would merely replace one one-hundredth of the nearly $70 billion that we send to the Middle East oil ministers every year for petroleum imported here, and replace it with investments we make in ourselves for the future. It gives the Secretary of Agriculture very flexible authority in order to spend these dollars in order to make agriculture an equal pillar along with other old fossil fuels.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/4\ minutes to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), who has waited all afternoon in order to make these comments. I thank the gentleman sincerely.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, I was just rising to either ask unanimous consent to strike the last word to get some of my own time on this or to plead with the chairman to see if we could not even get a few more minutes on each side. We have more speakers than we had anticipated, and it is an important issue and lives actually hang in the balance on it. I wondered if we might take a few additional minutes on each side.

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Chairman, certainly we know in most of those places it is women who are raising most of the food and feeding their villages. We know that the historically black colleges and Tuskegee Institute will be especially sensitive to that. Without a doubt their reach can be worldwide.