Collin Peterson

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Speaker, in 1972, Communicating for Agriculture (CA) started as a small group of dairy farmers in Minnesota's 7th Congressional District. Today CA has tens of thousands of agriculture and small business members across the United States, and 4 decades of legislative accomplishments on behalf of their members. From helping to form the first state high-risk pool for the medically uninsurable in Minnesota in 1976, to the first beginning farmer loan program in Iowa in 1980, to forming its own international agriculture exchange program in 1985, to receiving the first Agriculture Apprenticeship designation granted by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2007. CA was founded to promote the general health, welfare and advancement of people in agriculture or small business, and after 40 years of service to rural America, that mission continues to drive CA today. In 1986, the CA Foundation applied for and received authority from the United States Department of State to sponsor a J-1 training and intern program, allowing the exchange of young people to have a learning experience in agriculture. That year 6 trainees arrived as part of CA Education and Exchange Program (CAEP). Within 10 years, the program grew to become the largest of its kind in the United States. Today, CAEP works with more than 1,000 young people from more than 50 countries in the areas of agriculture, horticulture, enology, equine and turf management, with CAEP international offices in Denmark, Mexico, Columbia, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and China. Today, the U.S. State Department requires the J-1 Visa program to include a training plan that is agreed to by the CA Member Host, as well as the trainee or intern. Upon satisfactory completion of the program, CAEP awards a certificate of completion, which is taken by the trainee back to their home country where they will begin their career in their chosen field. The CA Foundation also provides opportunities and grants to Americans between the ages of 18 and 28 to have a similar 3 to 12 month placement in agriculture with one of our country partners around the world. Congratulations to CAEP on 25 years of international agriculture education and exchange leadership and to CA on 40 years of serving rural America.

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to remove myself as a cosponsor of H.J. Res. 47.

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. I rise in opposition to this amendment. As Chairman Lucas just indicated, we spent a lot of time working through this. This has a much bigger impact on my friends in the South than it does in our part of the world, although it does affect some of our folks. But one of the reasons is the way they finance and operate in the South, where they have a lot of shared rent. We are pretty much cash renting up in our part of the world now. But you've got folks that have land that get caught up in this AGI, and it causes problems in terms of financing their operations and the way that they have structured agriculture in the South. When I've been down there in Arkansas and other places--Mississippi, Georgia--the people that have been the most opposed to this are the bankers. And if you're concerned about having family farmers and keeping as many people on the land as possible, this is exactly the wrong way to go about it. You're going to upset the whole apple cart in doing this. Having said that, why do we have an adjusted gross income limit on farmers? Why don't we have it on everybody? If this is such a good idea, why don't we have anybody that gets any money from the government be subject to this AGI? If it's good enough for farmers, then anybody that makes $250,000 doesn't get anything from the government, period, just like farmers. That's how much sense this makes. The other thing that everybody talks about is that 80 percent of the people only get 10 percent of the payments. Well, people need to understand that we have a definition of ``farmer'' that is flawed and we should get rid of. They claim that we have 2 million farmers in this country. But do you know what it takes to be a farmer, the definition? If you could produce $1,000 of farm income--you don't have to, just if you could produce $1,000, you're considered a farmer. The true reality is we have 350,000 commercial farmers that produce over 90 percent of the food, and obviously they're going to get the payments because that's the way the system works. We have worked through this on the committee. I didn't agree with these AGI limits and payment limits that we put in the bill, but it was something we had to work out and we worked it out. This should not be dealt with on the floor. Once again, people who have made decisions based on the 5-year farm bill--they've made a lot of investments, they've put a lot of money into their operations based on how this thing is structured--we should not come in and pull the rug out in the middle of the deal here. And we should do this in the regular order in the farm bill. That's where it needs to be done. This is a bad amendment. I urge my colleagues to oppose it. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. Will the gentlewoman yield?

Mr. PETERSON. I'm sorry, I was out of the Chamber. As I understand it, you're trying to get the cormorant animal damage extended to other parts of the country.

Mr. PETERSON. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. PETERSON. That is a very important thing. This is getting to be a bigger and bigger problem. We've had the problem in the Midwest. They have had the problem in the Northeast. But there's a lot of problems I know in Alabama and Mississippi and some of those States as well because these birds migrate. As I said earlier, the reason we got into this problem is because we entered into this migratory bird treaty with Mexico and Canada back in 1973. In Mexico, blackbirds are sacred as part of their culture down there. And so there's a prohibition in that treaty against any hunting of any blackbirds, whether it be crows or cormorant or whatever it is. So that has tied our hands in terms of trying to deal with these issues. We've been able to make changes on kind of a pilot basis in certain areas, but we need to do this all over the country because these birds migrate. They go all the way from Canada, down to Mexico, and back and forth. They cause a lot of damage to fish farms. In my part of the world, it's sport fishing lakes. A cormorant will eat three times its weight in fish a day. They do tremendous damage when they get in there. So I support the gentlewoman and hope we can extend this program around the country.

Mr. PETERSON. I rise in opposition to the amendment. We are, once again, debating ethanol. There is so much misrepresentation and misunderstanding of what's going on. The ethanol industry has been one of the best things that has happened in rural America. We have created a tremendous amount of jobs in small towns that otherwise get bypassed, and they've been very successful. The way we've been able to do it up to this point is through the blend, by having people blend 10 percent ethanol. The EPA is approving going to 15 percent ethanol, but the industry has hit what they call a ``blend wall.'' Now, the blend was basically driven by the fact that the refineries and oil companies needed octane. Gasoline is low in octane and high in Btus. Ethanol is high in octane and low in Btus. Back in the old days, we used lead to raise the octane level. Then when lead was banned, the oil companies decided to create MTBE. We warned them against that, but they went ahead and built the MTBE plants, which, it turned out, poisoned the water in a number of cities in the United States. Then the oil companies and refineries went to the ethanol blend, which they should have done in the first place. That's working, but we're at a limit now. If we're going to move ahead, we have to have access to the marketplace. The problem that we have is that we don't have the cars like Brazil has which can burn different levels of ethanol, and we don't have the pumps in the gas stations so that people can have access to ethanol. If we're going to get rid of the VTAC and the other programs that we have in ethanol, we're okay with that as long as the consumers have the ability to make the choice at the station. If they want to burn ethanol, they've got to have the ability to be able to do that. So we need to get the pumps in the station. We need to get the car companies to start building vehicles like they do in Brazil, which run a 25-30 percent blend. The American companies are building these cars in Brazil. Every gas station in Brazil has ethanol as opposed to those in the United States. That's one of the reasons they have been so successful and why they are now completely independent from any foreign sources of fuel for their vehicles. What we're trying to do here is eventually eliminate the subsidies that people have complained about--the VTAC and other things. But in order for us to be able to maintain this industry and maintain these jobs in rural America, we have to be able to have the infrastructure. We have to have the blended pumps. We have to have the cars. The right blend is 25/30 percent. You will get the best performance, the best mileage. Brazil has figured this out. They've been doing this for a long time. Their blend is 26 percent. We have people that have put in amendments that say we can't blend above 10 percent. We have this foolishness about how it is going to ruin small engines and so forth. This argument has been going on since 1975, and you know, we've been blending ethanol, we haven't ruined any engines yet. So we need to defeat this amendment because this goes in the wrong direction. If you want a market that's open and lets consumers have a choice, the way to do it is to get the infrastructure in place. I ask my colleagues to oppose this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. The gentlewoman is exactly right. We would be happy to control the predators. The problem is they won't let us. And right now we're going through a delisting process in Minnesota on wolves. We just had a meeting a couple of nights ago, a big meeting up north. And part of the problem is, because of the budget situation and the pressure on that part of the budget, they don't even have the resources at this point, given the existing money, to be able to come in and help us control the wolves. And they are going through a process where they're turning over the management to the local State DNR, and they're not allowing the farmers to go out there and control the predators, and they're eating their calves and their sheep. And there's even a program in Minnesota where they pay them because we can't control it. And we would be happy to, you know, we have been trying to get, we're happy they are finally being delisted. But the farmers would take care of this. But in this agreement it says that we can't do anything for 5 years. We can't hunt these wolves for 5 years. We also have a problem in Minnesota and other States with cormorants. And we entered into an agreement with Mexico that we wouldn't shoot any black birds since 1973 under the Migratory Bird Act, and so we can't control cormorants. And Wildlife Services is the only way we can deal with that. And we've been making some progress on it. But prior to this treaty, we controlled these cormorants on these lakes by the local guys going out and hunting them. So we would be happy, if we get the Federal Government to get out of this, to deal with it. We wouldn't need any money from the government. This is a problem caused by us, and that's why we need this money. And the last thing we need to do is reduce it. So I oppose this amendment.

Mr. PETERSON. Madam Chair, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. PETERSON. I also rise to oppose this amendment. As the gentleman from Texas has indicated, we have been trying to resolve this. We made significant changes already and there are some ongoing consultations or whatever you want to call them with the Brazilians. But he is right: They will not lay out what they actually want to resolve this situation, and frankly, from what I can see, I don't think there is anything that we can do that they will agree to. So we are trying to work through this. But as I said when we had this discussion yesterday, it is very troubling to me that we are in this situation. With the way this WTO operates, the Brazilians have the most closed market in the world. You try to get any products into Brazil, and it is almost impossible. But do we care about that? No. They are spending I don't know how many billions of dollars of government money to increase production and increase agriculture in Brazil, way more than we are spending, and do we complain about that? No. Some people say it is because of the agreements that we have entered into. Who knows exactly what it is. But the Brazilians are not lily white in all of this. They are utilizing some of the flaws in the WTO agreement to push this cause, and, frankly, we have let them do it. So this needs to get dealt with in the regular order in the farm bill. This is not the place to do this on the floor of the House. We will deal with it. I think the chairman will back me up on that. We would love to have the Brazilians tell us what it is that they will agree to so we can resolve this. These discussions are ongoing. Hopefully they will be more forthcoming and we can get an answer to what it is that will solve this problem. Frankly, from my experience, I wouldn't hold my breath. So we will see. So I oppose this amendment and I ask my colleagues to oppose it. This is the wrong place to do it. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. I move to strike the last word.

Mr. PETERSON

Mr. PETERSON. But all I'm saying is this is an unnecessary amendment. It's in the statute. These things are covered. It makes no sense to delay the entire situation. You have maybe a few things that are of concern, and they are going to be taken care of.

Mr. PETERSON. There are hundreds of thousands of comments. I haven't read them all. I don't know what they all say.

Mr. PETERSON. They are the people that are against this. They were against it when we did it. So I just don't buy that the pension funds are the ones that are concerned about this because the things that they're concerned about are covered in the law, and they're being taken into account by Chairman Gensler and the people at the CFTC as they develop these rules.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, you know, this is kind of a surreal debate because I don't think we're talking about the real issue here. You know, the cotton program isn't perfect. A lot of the programs that we have in the Agriculture Committee aren't perfect. Freedom to Farm, it was passed in '96. It got us into some of these problems. I opposed. It saved a little bit of money, and then we ended up spending 10 times as much money bailing people out when it collapsed. So you have got to be careful what you are doing. But the problem here is, we're arguing about something that no longer exists. This program that they sued us under no longer exists. We have fixed it two or three times. We tried to address this. It was never good enough for the Brazilians. But we made some changes, and we made some more changes, and then we made some more changes in the 2008 farm bill. It's still not good enough for them. Cotton went through some very difficult times. I don't have any cotton in my district. This is not a parochial issue for me. But if they wouldn't have had that safety net, we would have been out of the cotton business. But what was going on at the same time? We had Brazil using government money to increase cotton production in Brazil. And this is something that isn't considered in the WTO because we are such geniuses that we agreed to this agreement that tied our hands and gave our competitors the ability to eat our lunch. And that's what's going on. You know, JBS, which just took over a big part of the livestock industry in this country, is financed by the Brazilian Government. They own 30 percent of JBS. Nobody complains about that. The Brazilian Government created most of this competition that collapsed the cotton prices worldwide. And then we agreed to let China into the WTO, and they promised that they weren't going to go into cotton production. We shipped our textile market to China and collapsed all of our textile industry. And what happened? They increased production like crazy. India increased production like crazy. Our cotton prices went down below the cost of production because of these trade agreements that we got involved in. But the way they're structured, there's nothing we can do about it. But they're going to sue us over a little step two program that we now got rid of, trying to keep our people in business. Now, if you want to ship the whole cotton industry to Brazil and China and India, you are on a good start to doing that. And if you keep on this road, you're going to ship the rest of agriculture to these so- called developing nations that are not developing nations. If you've been to Brazil, in agriculture, they are anything but a developing nation; but they're protected under the rules that we agreed to in this WTO deal. So is this a perfect solution? No. But we couldn't get the Brazilians to honestly sit down and work this out because they don't want to. They're trying to use this for other reasons, for other advantages in these trade negotiations and so forth. And I don't think we can ever do anything to satisfy them. So there's more to this than people are talking about here. This is not about saving money. This is about making sure that we can have a safety net in this country so we can maintain production of agriculture in the United States and not ship it all to other countries and not get dependent on foreign countries for our food, like we've become dependent on foreign countries for our energy. That would be the worst thing that could happen to us. So I just hope people understand all of the different ramifications. This isn't a perfect deal; but for the time being, it's probably the best solution that we can come up with. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the last word.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, I oppose this amendment, and I want to associate myself with the remarks of Chairman Lucas. In the 2008 farm bill, we spent a lot of time working through this payment limitation issue. There were a lot of different ideas and a lot of different discussions, and it was not easy. We made significant reforms in this payment limitation area, and as the chairman indicated, we came to a resolution and people are relying on that. We've got a 5- year farm bill. People make decisions not from year to year; they make them in the long term, and it's just not fair to come in and change things in the middle of the stream. One of the other things we did is we applied the payment limitations to all of the programs, and as I understand this amendment, it only applies to the commodity title. So we're once again going to create a different set of payment limitations for one part of the farm program compared to another. I don't know exactly what the purpose of this is because the farm programs are not designed to be a welfare program or to pick winners and losers and decide how big a farm is going to be and all that sort of stuff. The purpose of these farm programs is to support production agriculture so we can feed this country and, frankly, feed the world. You read all these stories coming from all over the world that we're worried that we're not going to have enough food to feed all of the increase in population and all that stuff. If you go down this track, you're going to go down a policy that's going to make it very difficult for us to feed the world. So this is ideology run amok. Some people have problems with the way we've designed this safety net. And I think we could do a better job, but this is just the wrong thing to do. This is too complicated an issue to settle here on the floor in a few minutes of debate. And it's just not fair to the people that have made long-term decisions, have invested a lot of money based on expecting that this farm bill was going to be in this form until September 30, 2012. So I encourage my colleagues to oppose this amendment. I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. PETERSON. I thank the gentlelady for yielding. I just wanted to clarify that it was discussed that what we were trying to do was to get the top 20 recipients off of the EWG Web site, and I just got a copy of it. Four of the top 10 recipients actually are title or law firms that did work for WRP. The top one is Fidelity National Title at $4.8 million. That is all work that was done on WRP contracts. It looks to me like six of the top 20 are actually abstract and title firms that did work on conservation WRP contracts that are not affected by this amendment, so that's a problem. You're throwing all these statistics around and claiming that these big guys are getting all this money. But these aren't even farmers. These are law firms. Maybe we should have payment limitations on law firms. That might be a good thing. Maybe we should only let these guys do $125,000 worth of WRP work so that we can spread it around a little bit and make it more fair. That's the other problem with this whole concept.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman and Members, this is part of the continuing effort to delay the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Act as long as possible. We've seen some other examples of that. This section deals with public reporting swap data. What people need to understand, the people that are most afraid of the public disclosure are not the people that are using this market. It's the banks. What this is really about and what this end-user debate that's been going on is about more than anything else is that the public disclosure of this information will lower the spreads of the Wall Street banks that do these swaps. That's what's the bottom line of this whole deal. If the market participants know more, like what we do in the exchange trading and so forth, the margins are going to come down and the profits of these big banks are going to shrink. In fact, some people have said that they think that once this is implemented that it's probably going to reduce the profits of the Wall Street banks 40 percent. And they don't like it, and they want to delay it. So some would argue that we need more data collection, and I guess that's what you are arguing before this public reporting. I think for some swaps, that is the case, and I will agree with that. But on other swaps, the institutions are already collecting this data. They can go forward with this public reporting. We have the information. There's no reason to delay it. In other cases where we don't have the information, it probably isn't appropriate to delay it. But the CFTC has the discretion to do this, and it's right in the law. It's on page 328 of the conference report. And we've put in there the criteria to allow them to move ahead with the swaps where we have the data and to delay it where we don't have the data. But what you are trying to do is you are going to delay the whole thing, and all it's going to do is ensure that these profits and these big bonuses that they're paying on Wall Street can go on longer than they need to. So I don't know any reason why we need to do this. If you read this, they have all the discretion. All of the problems that people brought up with the block trades and these other things that people were concerned about are in there. And the last thing it says: They have to take into account whether the public disclosure will materially reduce market liquidity. And they are doing that, and they are doing that as we're going through this process. And I believe that at the end of the day, it's going to be fine.

Mr. PETERSON. I yield to the gentleman from New Jersey.

Mr. PETERSON. On some things.

Mr. PETERSON. Well, I wouldn't say there isn't any information. Some of these are so thinly traded that you are never going to be able to have real-time reporting. We understand that, and there is not going to be a requirement on those. But there's no reason to stop the real-time reporting where we have the information and where that information will make these prices better for the people that use it. And this is the same issue with the end users. They're going to get a better deal if we allow this disclosure. Why they're fighting us is beyond me, unless they're in cahoots with the Wall Street banks. I'm not sure. Do people think that the folks on Wall Street aren't making enough money? Is that what this is about? I don't know.

Mr. PETERSON. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.