Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2012
Floor Speech
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Mr. FARR. It's my pleasure to join you in this amendment. I actually have the best salmon caught in the lower 48 in Monterey Bay. A history of fishing in Monterey, used to be the sardine capital of the world. We're very sensitive to the fact that people are trying to mess around with the natural process and the Food and Drug Administration is set to approve genetically engineered salmon through a process the FDA uses to approve new drugs for animals. There's something wrong with the fact that in the approval process our food is now treated the same as animal drugs.
If approved, genetically engineered salmon would be the first genetically modified animal allowed onto the American dinner plate. Approval of genetically engineered salmon poses serious threats to human health, our fishing communities, and our wildlife stock fish.
They have no long-term studies on the safety of genetically engineered fish. There could be grave, unintended consequences on human health. Preliminary studies show that the compounds in genetically engineered salmon may be linked to cancer and severe drug allergies.
We've seen that the dominant method of raising salmon in other parts of the world is an open net, these pens in the ocean, and farmed fish escape these facilities every year. The impact of genetically engineered salmon escaping could be detrimental to wild stocks. The list goes on and on and on.
Our fishing communities are already facing challenges, and genetically engineered salmon would have an additional effect of lowering wild salmon prices, as already seen with normal farmed salmon. Lower prices, combined with declines in wild salmon stocks, would be economically detrimental to our fishermen, our fishing culture, and our coastal communities. It is unnecessary to genetically engineer salmon.
For these reasons, I support Mr. Young's amendment that prohibits funds to the FDA to approve genetically engineered salmon.
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Mr. FARR. I strongly support this amendment because the language in the bill--I'm going to read it to you. It's one paragraph, but it's the most draconian language because we've never done this before ever in an ag bill. It says: ``The committee directs the Department to provide an electronic notification to the committee at least 72 hours prior to any travel in support of the Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food initiative, and such notification shall include the agenda of the entire trip along with the cost to U.S. taxpayers. Additionally, the committee directs the Department to post media advisories for all such trips on its Web site, and that such advisories include the same information.''
My God, we don't do this to know your soldier, to know your veteran, to know your school teacher, to know anybody else that's in the public service, to know your law enforcement officer; and yet they're doing this for Know Your Farmer?
This program, as Mr. Kingston pointed out, we just had the ag report come out and I'm very proud that one county in my district does $4 billion worth of agriculture, as pointed out in that report, that grows 59 percent of all the lettuce consumed in the United States in one county in California that I represent. Part of that is this program now that they're doing, which is Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food.
Consumers can go with their cell phones into a grocery store; and because of the barcode there, they can ZIP it and it immediately comes up the farmer who grew that food saying this is who I am and this is where I grew it and this is how many days it takes to get to you, and all the things you might want to--if we're going to educate people about nutrition, I can't think of a more exciting way to do it.
And to require that the Department has to essentially do this gestapo, looking at every time you move you have to report to a higher authority on your initiative and on your entire trip and the agenda and cost, we don't do that for anybody else in the Federal Government, and I don't think we should do it for our farmers or for our members of the U.S. Department of Agriculture who are supporting our farmers.
So I support this amendment very strongly.
Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition because I cannot, for the life of me, understand why you are so afraid of Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food. They say, well, we need to have this program authorized. My God, we went to war without authorizing it. We spent all that money, and half the people don't even question it. And you want to question Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food?
I think this is a direct attack on the White House initiative, which is about nutrition, which is about trying to get people--I mean, we talked about this yesterday, about how you have places in this country that are food deserts. You have places where there are no grocery stores. There are 7-Elevens. They don't have fresh fruits and vegetables. People can't go down to a local store and find fresh fruits and vegetables.
So what do we do? This committee puts money into the USDA to help farmers markets get established in these tough areas, to encourage farmers to come in, and at the same time teach people who have never shopped for fresh fruits and vegetables, never been to a farmers market.
We have actually tied in, in my district, the issuing of food stamps and WIC vouchers so that they will spend them right there, and 65 percent of the income that comes to the farmers at the farmers markets comes from them.
So this is all part of the initiatives to get people to know about agriculture. Milk doesn't come from a carton. Food doesn't come from a grocery store. It gets grown somewhere by a farmer, he and his wife. And we are trying to get kids to know something about agriculture. We are putting in school gardens. All of this is part of Know Your Farmer--Know Your Food, and you want to strike it.
What is this? Is this some kind of conspiracy that you are afraid of? People might learn a little bit about where food comes from in America, and there is organic food and that you have choices and you just don't have to eat everything that is packaged and processed and full of salts and sugars and additives and preservatives?
What are we afraid of? What are we afraid of? My God, to strike it, or tell the department that they can't do this, I think it is not in our best intentions, and it is not smart nutrition.
We are trying to get people, I know, because I am trying to lose weight and it is a very hard thing to change your character, to change your eating habits. Unless we do that, we are going to grow a lot of Americans who aren't going to be very healthy because they don't know their farmer and they don't know their food. And if you strike this ability for the department to go out and do that kind of outreach, we are going to have a less healthy America.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
I have concerns about where the money comes from as all these bills are offsetting, but I think that the purpose here should be funded. We have this whole initiative--and some of it has been attacked tonight--about trying to get healthy foods grown by American farmers to people in areas that are called food deserts, as the gen tle lady from Texas pointed out. There are places that people just can't go. There isn't a grocery store. There aren't fresh fruits and vegetables.
I mean, think of the 7-Eleven. That's the kind of convenience stores that are around. Even the one we use up here a couple of blocks away is very limited in the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables it has.
So what this initiative is all about, and it's the President's initiative too, is trying to get food--it's an educational process. I think the hardest cultural--this is what I learned from living in other cultures in the Peace Corps. The hardest thing to do is to get people to change their eating habits. We all know that struggle when we go on a diet. So it takes a lot of education. It takes a lot of support, but it also takes the need to have access to it.
You need to have access to the fresh fruits and vegetables, and they can either come to you in a farmers market or you can go to them. But if you have neither a farmers market and there's nothing to go to, you have no option. And that's what this amendment is about, getting some money into the program that will be able to outreach and getting good, nutritious food to families who most need it who, without that, have a good chance of not growing up healthy, high incidence of obesity, high incidence of diabetes, high-risk issues that cost a lot of money for the taxpayers when they have to go on dialysis or have to be under treatment.
So we have spent many years here in the committee--and the chairman knows it very well--of looking at how do we prevent this from happening when the choices are there. These are preventable diseases and preventable ill health situations, but we've got to reach out and do it, and that's what this amendment does and I think it deserves support.
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Mr. FARR. I wasn't going to rise on this amendment--and I probably shouldn't--but this discussion just bugs me.
I represent more productive agriculture in my district than anyone in this room--$4 billion in just one county--and I represent a bunch of counties. What we grow are specialty crops. We grow 85 crops in Monterey County. As we were talking about earlier, 58 percent of all the lettuce in the United States is grown in that county. We grow 35 different varieties of wine grapes, and we are the leading counties in strawberry production and in a bunch of berry productions. In fact, our motto there is that we're the ``salad bowl capital of the world,'' which includes all of the ingredients in salad--celery, lettuce. All those things, we grow.
Do you know what? They don't get a dime of support from the Federal Government. If the market falls, they eat it. If a disaster comes in, they eat it.
So the reason these amendments are brought up by Mr. Kind and Mr. Blumenauer year after year is that, frankly--do you know what?--the farm bill doesn't address this issue. It really doesn't. It's too tough--it's too politically tough--and there are too many vested interests in this town. You have a whole bunch of agriculture out there, and some people would suggest that more than all of the money created in commodity supports is in what they call ``specialty crops,'' and that's the stuff you eat all the time.
You can't have this bifurcated world out there where you have a bunch of people who are essentially on welfare and a bunch of people who are just assuming all the risk. What really surprises me is that, with the conservative side of the aisle over here that really is driven toward market approaches to solve problems, this is not a market approach. This is a subsidy. It's a taxpayer subsidy, and it's going to very wealthy people in some cases.
So I am rising to say this amendment, as in the past, gets defeated; but these gentlemen have an issue, and I just beg with the leaders. I've got great respect for the ranking member of the Ag Committee here on our side of the aisle. I know he can wrestle with these problems. He's a CPA. He knows these things.
I think the handwriting is on the wall. If the conservatives on your side of the aisle would take this on as an issue that Americans are really going to address, we may get some progress on the farm bill. If you don't, you're abandoning your marketing concepts, and you're abandoning what is needed in modern America.
Just remember, that apple, that pear, that banana in there, that celery, the strawberries--the list goes on and on with all the fruits and vegetables--they don't get any of these payments. So let's not have a bifurcated agricultural production out there where half of it depends on taxpayer payments and the other half has to just live by market forces. Let's have everybody a lot more influenced by market forces.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chair, Pigford v. Glickman was a class action discrimination suit between the USDA and black farmers. The suit was filed by an estimated 2,000 black farmers who said that USDA discriminated against them in loan programs. A settlement agreement was approved in 1999.
The suit claimed that USDA discriminated against black farmers on the basis of race and failed to investigate or properly respond to complaints from 1983 to 1997.
The deadline for submitting a claim was September 12, 2000. However, a large number of applicants filed late and reported deficiencies in representation by class counsel.
Consequently, the 2008 farm bill (PL 110-246) permitted any claimant who had submitted a late-filing request under Pigford and who hadn't previously obtained a determination on the merits of their claim should obtain a determination. A maximum of $100 million in mandatory spending was made available for payments of these claims in the 2008 farm bill.
The multiple claims that were subsequently filed by over 25,000 black farmers were consolidated into a single case, In re Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation (commonly referred to as Pigford II).
On February 18, 2010, Attorney General Holder and Secretary Vilsack announced a $1.25 billion settlement of these Pigford II claims.
The Pigford II settlement provides both a fast-track settlement process and high payments to potential claimants who go through a more rigorous review and documentation process.
Potential claimants can seek the fast-track payments of up to $50,000 plus debt relief, or choose the longer process damages of up to $250,000.
Finally, our Nation's black farmers who were discriminatecl against by their own government have received some modicum of justice.
Despite years of political gamesmanship that prevented us from finding a fair resolution, thousands of families who have waited for the settlements will now receive them.
We cannot deny them this basic justice.
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Mr. FARR. Mr. Chairman, I know it's late, but I rise in opposition to this, because, first of all, using telemedicine by FDA I don't think is, one, illegal, or ill-wise. Secondly, I think what the gentleman is going to talk about is a legal drug in the United States. It's been a legitimate drug in the United States after it met all of the rigorous FDA process in 1996 and has been available since 2000 in this country.
I remember vigorous debates in this committee about the conditionality by which FDA would license this drug. It is legal and available in all 50 States in the United States, in Washington, DC, in Guam, and in Puerto Rico. It's a prescription drug which is not available to the public through pharmacies. Instead, its distribution is restricted to specifically qualified licensed physicians. To use it, a woman must go to a doctor's office.
Whatever controversy surrounded the introduction of RU-486 in the United States was settled years ago, and there's no reason for this amendment other than to stir up the controversy over the reproductive rights of women. I think by the gentleman's comments, you can see that that's what he's trying to do.
I would urge us all to oppose this amendment. And frankly it doesn't have anything to do with USDA funds, because we don't do telemedicine abortions.
I yield back the balance of my time.
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