Sam Farr: “This is the kind of program that I think Mr. Flake pointed out that you wonder why we use taxpayer moneys to market…”

“This is the kind of program that I think Mr. Flake pointed out that you wonder why we use taxpayer moneys to market American agriculture abroad, and you say, well, we don't need to do that. As he pointed out, he pointed out a couple of great big companies that take advantage of it. But guess what? In this legislation we carve out so that the small businesses can take advantage of this. And why do we do that? I don't know how much you see in the advertising that goes on to buy products from other countries, but remember the Juan Valdez coffee ad for Colombian coffee, ``Wake up and smell the coffee''? Guess what? That was subsidized by the Colombian Government. It was very, very effective. Coffee prices actually went down and they lost their ability because it cost them about $40 million a year to do that advertising. What we have created in the United States is a matching program saying, you put up your money first, put up the private sector money, and we will match it, and we carve out and protect it. {time} 1120 And I'm just looking. California has a lot of congressional districts. You wouldn't think that districts in San Francisco or Los Angeles--we have 53 Members of Congress from California. There's only four congressional districts in California that don't take advantage of this program. I would imagine those are in the middle of Los Angeles. Because there are companies in it--and I can go through all of them. A lot of them are very small.…”