Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act of 2013
Floor Speech
Mr. WELCH. I thank the gen tle lady.
This amendment is not on the level. It uses a word that is important to all of us: work.
Of course people want to work, but there is no money for a work program. There is an obligation on the person who has no income, who has children, to somehow magically create their own work program. Any of the work programs have to have some support to get people to be able to move from poverty to work.
This is a political statement. It's not a work program.
How poor is poor? This is telling folks they're not poor enough. Grind them and their children down; 1-year-old children will lose food as a result of this.
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Mr. WELCH. The question facing this Congress is, Will we have a farm bill that respects farm families?
This is about individual families that are working hard to try to survive, not to get rich.
Market stabilization is exactly what Apple Computer does. If they make and sell more iPods, they produce more. If sales go down, they taper off.
Why not give that market signal to our farmers with second-, third-, fourth-generation families in Vermont, the Kennett family, the Richardson family, the Rowell family?
All they want to do is produce good, nutritious milk for the people in their community. This market stabilization gets them out of the death spiral, where they have absolutely no control over what that price is. And when it plunges, the only opportunity they have to try to survive is to increase production. The price goes down again.
This market stabilization is using the market. It's an ally of the farmer, as it should be. So this makes sense.
And what I am so proud of is that America's farmers, from Vermont to California, worked together to come up with something that would help pass that farm on to the next generation, and it saves money for the taxpayers.
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