Jay Dickey: “understanding the immediate need for assistance that our farmers have, I have signed the conference report, and I am…”

“understanding the immediate need for assistance that our farmers have, I have signed the conference report, and I am supporting this bill. However, there were several issues that were left undecided, and I want to discuss one of them, that is, sanctions on our agricultural products with other countries. Let us take Cuba, for example, and in this context, we have to understand that our Arkansas farmers are the finest and the largest producers of rice there is in this country. For 37 years, it has been proven that the embargo on food and medicine in Cuba does not work. Fidel Castro and the members of his Communist regime have never missed a meal, but the poor have gone hungry. Those are who the embargo is affecting. But the effects of this embargo are not only felt 90 miles off of Florida's coast, it has had much more of a local effect. An enormous market for our agricultural products has been deemed off-limits. Our Arkansas farmers sit facing one of the largest financial crises that we have ever encountered. They are the best farmers in the world and produce an excellent crop, but they need more places to market it. The USDA estimates that Cuba will import 570,000 metric tons of long grain, rough rice from countries all across the world. Conversely, the United States has over 630,000 metric tons of this very type of rice from the 1998 harvest still in storage.”