Mitch Landrieu: “with all due respect, I rise to oppose the amendment offered by the Senator from Idaho and urge my colleagues to table…”

“with all due respect, I rise to oppose the amendment offered by the Senator from Idaho and urge my colleagues to table this particular amendment. I congratulate the chairman of the committee, the Senator from Iowa, Mr. Harkin, for his hard work. It is not easy to put together any major piece of legislation, let alone, as I have learned in my few years in the Senate, legislation regarding agriculture because, in different ways, all of our States participate in the infrastructure of agriculture, some of us more as producers but all of us as consumers. Weighing those interests between the consumers, the producers, and the processors, and all the international trade implications is quite complicated. So I thank the chairman and the ranking member for their extraordinary work in trying to put a bill together to which we can generally agree. Representing the South and Louisiana, and speaking for the dairy farmers, let me say that when the original bill came out, it did not work for southern dairy farmers. The national pooling concept was really not very fair to many regions, including the dairy farmers in Louisiana. And we have been suffering. We have lost over 25 percent of our farms. If we do not do something, we are going to lose even more. It is not right to not address this issue. So we proposed a compact--the same as the Northeast has--for the South that would have worked beautifully.…”