Bart Stupak: “50,000 agriculture-related jobs since the implementation of NAFTA. The tomato industry has lost $750 million since 1993.…”

“50,000 agriculture-related jobs since the implementation of NAFTA. The tomato industry has lost $750 million since 1993. They said our job, our health, our Nation's food standards have gone downhill. But we said, look, can we compete with Mexico to produce food at a competitive price while maintaining the world's highest food safety standards? They unequivocally said yes, we can, as long as the food coming into our country meets the same standards. Mr. Speaker, we are not talking about a surcharge or anything to make it meet our standards. We are talking about some very, very basic health standards that this Nation has set forth, has fought for over the years to develop the world's greatest and safest food supply. But look what has happened. Take our own State of Michigan. We had the school hot lunch program in which strawberries had come in from Mexico and they were tainted with hepatitis A. And Michigan is as far as one can get from the Mexico southern border. But we have to understand that our fruit and our food supply, especially our winter vegetables, 50 percent or more comes in from Mexico during these winter months. So we had these strawberries that got in the school lunch program and they came from Mexico. At the initial outbreak we had 179 Michigan students contracted hepatitis A after eating tainted Mexican strawberries.”