Thomas Mott Osborne: “at the present time we are conducting some talks, WTO negotiations, involving the European Union. I would like to call…”

“at the present time we are conducting some talks, WTO negotiations, involving the European Union. I would like to call attention to some figures that I think most people are not totally aware of. First of all, if you compare the United States economy with the European Union, the United States economy is $11.7 trillion annually and the European Union is $9.4 trillion. So they are pretty comparable. The import tariffs we have on goods coming from the European Union into the U.S. are 12 percent, and tariffs on U.S. goods going into the European Union are 30 percent. So we have comparable economies and yet a tremendous disparity in tariffs. This led to an agricultural trade deficit of minus $6.3 billion last year, which was the biggest deficit that we had with any entity that we were trading with for agriculture. On export subsidies, the European Union provides $3 billion and we provide $31.5 million, so they are roughly 100 to 1 on money they spend on subsidizing their exports to other countries. As far as farm subsidies per acre are concerned, the United States subsidizes agriculture at $38 per acre with the European Union at $295 an acre. So this is a tremendous discrepancy. One other set of data I wish to point out is that we have had two cases of BSE, or mad cow disease, in the United States. The European Union has had 189,102 in the European Union in the last 10, 15 years.…”