Political Quotes

“I want to commence by stating my deep appreciation to Chairman Lugar and the ranking member, Senator Leahy, for their great consideration of issues that were important to agriculture across America and especially important to agriculture and the people of my State of Florida. Mr. President, as you well know, the State of Florida is a State peculiarly vulnerable to a variety of climatic and other disasters. One of the things that we have tried to do is to learn from those disasters and avoid, where possible, a repetition of previous mistakes, and to bring to the attention of the appropriate decisionmakers steps that could be taken in order to moderate the impact of future adverse consequences. In the last few years, we have had an unusual number of incidents that have impacted Florida agriculture. Hurricane Andrew is the best known, but by no means the only such incident. As a result of that, we have assembled a number of lessons learned, in terms of how American agricultural law for disasters, crop insurance, and other steps that are intended to soften the impact of negative events, could be modified to be more effective and applied to the special agriculture of our State.”