Max Baucus: “first I thank the chairman of the committee, second my good friend from Idaho, Senator Craig, and other Senators who…”

“first I thank the chairman of the committee, second my good friend from Idaho, Senator Craig, and other Senators who have cosponsored this amendment. There are at the present moment about 30 cosponsors of this amendment. It is bipartisan. I might say there is tremendous interest in this legislation also in the other body. To review where we are, back in the year 2000, not too many years ago, we in the Congress approved legislation called the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act, otherwise known as TSREEA. What was the point of that legislation? It was legislation which authorized cash-in-advance food and medicine sales to Cuba. That is, the Congress carved out a substantive area of food and agricultural sales to Cuba. It did not provide a broad-brush authorization for trade with Cuba; rather, it narrowed it to food and to medicine for humanitarian reasons. It just made sense for the United States to be able to send its medicine and its food products, its agriculture, to Cuba. Clearly this made a lot of sense. Food should never be used as a weapon, and surely no dictator has ever missed a meal. Second, big government has no business telling the U.S. farmers and ranchers to whom they could sell their products, for a lot of reasons. One is agriculture is facing such dire straits in many parts of our country. In addition, U.S. agriculture is facing a shrinking trade surplus.…”