Political Quotes

“I thank my friend. First, there have been mistakes made in the administration of farm programs. And, for example, the gentleman's illustration about the Texas ranch issue relative to the space shuttle tragedy, that was not under an ad hoc disaster bill, but we believe it was very poor administration of relief under another program called section 32. We would hope that never happens again. Action is taken here to make certain that it doesn't. The disaster bill precludes losses on livestock. Moreover, they can only go in areas designated by the Secretary as having sustained a disaster loss; at which time, in the legislation, it's specified that the whole farm of the applicant has to suffer a qualifying loss. So no more if you happen to live in an area where somebody else got hit, we got a check for you. That's done, and tightened up considerably under this program. We think that all of those are good government provisions. We also addressed in the 2002 bill, and expect it to anticipate continuing in this bill, price support protection in the farm bill. So we have not had, since 2002, a disaster bill to respond to collapsed prices in the marketplace. We expect that that would absolutely continue. We've got a provision in the farm bill to respond to that. No ad hoc disaster required for price collapse.”