Gilbert Gutknecht: “very soon the Congress will be engaged in a very vicious debate about milk. And that may surprise some people; but when…”

“very soon the Congress will be engaged in a very vicious debate about milk. And that may surprise some people; but when we start talking about milk marketing order reforms, it is amazing how aggressive some Members can become. Mr. Speaker, in the last couple of days our colleague, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Green) and myself have sent to all of our other colleagues a copy of an editorial which appeared recently in the Kansas City Star. Mr. Speaker, I would like to read some excerpts of that editorial because as far as I am concerned they got the debate exactly right. I read and I quote, in 1996, Congress ordered the administration to simplify the pricing of milk. That is easy enough. Stop regulating it. But this is the farm sector and a free market in milk is somehow inconceivable. Instead, milk prices are calculated from rules and equations filling several volumes of the Code of Federal Regulations. The administration's proposed reform would reduce the number of regions for which the price of wholesale milk is regulated from 33 to 11. Fine, but it would also perpetuate the loopy Depression-era notion that the price of milk should in some respects be based in part on its distance from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Under current policy, producers farther away from this supposed heart of the dairy region generally receive higher premiums or differentials.…”