Collin Peterson: “a lot of people make a lot of claims about this bill. Editorial writers, most of them get the information wrong. But as…”

“a lot of people make a lot of claims about this bill. Editorial writers, most of them get the information wrong. But as has been mentioned here before, 15 percent of the bill goes to farmers; 9 percent of that goes to traditional commodity type programs; the balance of it to crop insurance and the new disaster program; 73 rac{1}{2}\ percent of this bill goes to nutrition programs, while 7 percent goes to conservation. So you can talk all you want about the bull's-eye on the back of the farmers, but people need to understand that the European Union now is having discussion to get rid of their direct payments and increase their commodity price supports similar to what we have here in the United States. And there are people in this country that would like to do this as well. This ideology that's been pushed by the World Bank, the IMF, all of these other world organizations, is part of the reason we're in trouble in this country and in the world. We have, not just us but countries all over the world, have sold food below the cost of our production. Some of our opponents want us to keep doing this. I understand if you're a livestock farmer you want to keep buying cheap corn. But we've addicted these folks in these developing countries to cheap food prices. Now that we're getting prices that are more realistic, all of a sudden it's a problem because they didn't develop their own agriculture. They got hooked on exports from the United States and from other countries.”