Supporting National Dairy Month

Statement

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. WELCH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Thompson. It is a pleasure to work with you on this important legislation, on this important resolution.

Mr. Speaker, as my friend and colleague from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney) said, our dairy farms face a crisis they've never ever seen. The crisis they face is not of their own making. Farmers have to live with the uncertainty of nature. They have to live with the uncertainty of a collapse of an export market. That's what happened when there was the melamine scare in China. They have to live with the uncertainty of an economy where prices in the purchasing of cheese in secondary, non-fluid milk products have come down with the recession. Yet the importance of our having local agricultural activities in all of our districts has never been more important.

People want and need local agriculture. In my State, it's dairy. That's the backbone of our agricultural industry. In your State, it may be wheat; it may be potatoes. In States across the country where there is local agriculture, it serves not just the needs of our farmers who make a very good, a very decent and a very honest living from working the land; it serves the health needs of our citizens.

It serves the environmental needs of our countryside. The farmers are the custodians of our landscape. That's certainly true in Vermont, which is to the benefit of all of us. It is certainly to the benefit of our tourism industry.

Mr. Speaker, the crisis that the farmers face right now, particularly in dairy, where there's that disparity between what it costs them to produce milk and what they're being paid, is not survivable unless we do two things:

One, provide short-term relief. We must find a way to increase the milk support payments on a temporary basis to help them get through the fall. If we fail to do that, they will fail themselves, and that would be a tragedy, because these farms, once gone, are gone forever and, with it, the environmental values, the land values, and the benefit to all of us to have local food production.

The average distance of farm to table for food products that we eat is about 1,500 miles. Think about the energy consumption that we're wasting and what we can preserve if we keep production local.

The second thing we have to do is what we have known since the era of the Depression, and that is we have to have stable pricing and adjustments so that farmers can weather the ups and downs in the cycle over which they have no control.

Now, I want to remind folks of something Mr. Courtney said when we were before Mr. Scott's committee. We bailed out the financial industry with
billions and billions of dollars, and the reason was that they were too big to fail. It was not because they had been responsible and had done everything within their power to avoid the catastrophe. In fact, they caused the catastrophe.

Yet because they were too big to fail, in order to mitigate the impact on innocent people, the taxpayers came to the rescue.

Now, is it the case that with our farmers, they are too small to matter? What kind of Congress is it if that's the verdict that we come to when it comes to our farmers who, through no fault of their own--unlike Wall Street--who through no fault of their own find themselves in a real jam.

Mr. Speaker, we have to take extraordinary action because this is an extraordinary time, and it's deserved because these are extraordinary people. This resolution is allowing us to focus attention where it needs to be on some of the best people among us in this country--and that's our dairy farmers, the folks would work the land, day in and day out, year in and year out, generation to generation.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source