William M. ``Mac'' Thornberry: “when we look at all the different approaches that have been tried in agriculture since the 1930's, I think the marketing…”

“when we look at all the different approaches that have been tried in agriculture since the 1930's, I think the marketing loan has got to be one of the most successful and it seems to me silly to throw out one of the things that has worked the best. If we looked at the estimates, better than 90 percent of the cotton that trades on the world market has some sort of price support or subsidy of one kind or another. When we look at the amount of agriculture that we produce in this country, about one-third is generally exports, but about half the cotton is exported. Our key competitors in cotton are the centrally planned economies, like the Soviet Union, former Soviet Union, and China. In that environment, our cotton exports have gone up from about 2 million bales to about 7 million bales under the marketing loan program when we are competing against countries like that. The marketing loan has allowed us to compete with these other countries without big government costs, without costing the taxpayers a lot of money. If we have a program like that that moves the commodity, does not incur storage costs and yet allows us to compete in the world market, why would we not want to do more of it? As a matter of fact, that is exactly what his underlying bill does. It expands it to other commodities. The amendment should be rejected.”