Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, our Nation's international food assistance programs are broken. They drive our deficits higher while providing little to no value to taxpayers and even harming the recipient countries. I am grateful for Mr. Harris' manager's amendment that reduced funding for the destructive so-called Food for Peace program, and I urge extending the cost cuts to its sister program, McGovern-Dole, sometimes known as Food for Education. When we dump free food on developing markets, their domestic farmers can't compete. I mean, who can compete with free? Their domestic farmers are forced out of business, and investment in their domestic agricultural sector dwindles. In fact, we hurt those we seek to assist. We have known that this problem has existed for years. In 2010, watching international food aid destroy his country's agricultural sector, the President of Haiti begged us to stop, to stop sending it. Further, reflecting on his administration's role in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, President Bill Clinton said: ``I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people.'' Bill Clinton even recognized the mistake. However, we keep making it. We need to stop impoverishing farmers in countries with developing agricultural sectors and stop discouraging private investment in those sectors.…”