Charles W. Stenholm: “This amendment goes at exactly the wrong target. The market loan has worked very, very well. It is not a guaranteed…”

“This amendment goes at exactly the wrong target. The market loan has worked very, very well. It is not a guaranteed payment. To hear that this is a guaranteed payment, there are no projected costs for the market loan program this year, because the price of world cotton is way above the loan. Therefore, there are no projected costs. But it is the purpose of having the program in place, like a few years ago with the collapse of the former Soviet Union; when that collapsed, there was a tremendous increased volume of cotton on the market. At that point in time, had it not been for the market loan, we would have seen depression prices in the cotton market in the United States. But because the market loan was there, yes, it cost some money. It cost some money, but it worked for the purposes of an industry that is providing tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs in the United States. This amendment is targeted, the rhetoric at least that I have heard today, is targeted at the wrong area.”