Arlen Specter: “this resolution is being submitted on behalf of Senators Santorum, Feingold, Kohl, Jeffords, Leahy, Wellstone, Snowe…”

“this resolution is being submitted on behalf of Senators Santorum, Feingold, Kohl, Jeffords, Leahy, Wellstone, Snowe, and Collins. It follows activity which Senator Santorum and I had undertaken in our State where the farmers have been very hard hit by low milk prices and rising costs of production, so that many, many farmers are near bankruptcy. It is my understanding that this is a national problem, not only a problem in Pennsylvania. On Monday of this week, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman went to northeastern Pennsylvania and heard from a large assembly of farmers, estimated at some 500, and heard firsthand the plight of those farmers, again, as I say representative of the Nation. We all know that we rely upon the farmers for our supply of food. We know how important milk is in that supply. And we have a large group of farmers who laid it on the line in very emphatic and dramatic terms about their impending bankruptcy, the hard times they were facing because the price of milk had dropped so precipitously from $15.37 per hundredweight in September to $11.34 cents per hundredweight in December 1996, all the time costs going up. In our inquiry on this issue, we found that a key ingredient on the pricing of milk was the price of cheese, and that the price of cheese had been established by the Green Bay Cheese Exchange, and that the price on the Green Bay Cheese Exchange might not be realistic of the accurate market price.”