Remarks in a roundtable discussion with farmers and agricultural leaders in Broadview, Montana

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, June 5, 1995

The President. Thank you very much. I want to mostly just listen to you, but I thought that it might be helpful for me to talk for a minute or two about the kinds of decisions that are coming before our country in the next year, on the farm bill and other things.

I want to thank Senator Baucus, and I want to thank Congressman Williams for always making sure that the White House and the President know about the concerns and the interests of the people of this State. They have never been bashful about doing that, and they've done a pretty good job of it. And I thank them for that.

I have been concerned about the interest and welfare of agriculture and rural America generally for a long time and a long time before I became President. A lot of you know that the State where I lived, Arkansas, where I was Governor for 12 years, is a big agricultural State. And it's a different kind of agriculture, by and large. I had Les take me out in the field and explain how you bring in the wheat crop, when you do it, and how you decide what land to lay out. But my State is principally rice, soybeans, and then wheat, and chicken and also a lot of - there's a big hog-growing operation and a sizable cattle operation there.

And I've been through a lot of things with farmer friends of mine. I was Governor all during the 1980's when we lost a lot of our farmers, and a lot of my friends went down. And we were struggling even to keep our rural banks alive and keep them in a position where they could finance farms. We changed all of our State laws to try to do that. So I've seen the worst times of agriculture.

I think the '90 farm bill in many ways has worked reasonably well, although I think there are some problems with it. Since I have been President, I have worked very hard on an overall economic strategy for our country which kept in mind the important role of agriculture. We have fought like crazy to have more trade and fairer trade for American agriculture.

We were able to get the GATT world trade agreement because, after years and years of fighting, we were able to persuade the Europeans to agree to reduce their agriculture subsidies so that they wouldn't be pushing us out of markets because they were subsidizing to a greater extent than we were.

We were able to begin to export some things to Japan and China and the Far East that we'd never been able to export before, principally rice, apples, and other fruit products. We negotiated, as Max said, this one-year agreement with Canada and set up this commission to try to resolve this problem that they have. And as you know, they - you understand this far better than I do - but there were some things which happened in the original trade negotiations with Canada, and there are some things that are basically endemic to the way they organize their agriculture which make it almost impossible for us to get a fair deal unless we have a specific bilateral agreement on it. So we've been working very hard on that.

A few weeks ago, I went to Ames, Iowa, to Iowa State University, and had a national rural conference and talked to farmers from all over the country about some other problems we've got, specific problems like the beef problem with Korea. And we also talked about the need to continue in this new farm bill a decent level of support for agricultural research, a decent level of effort and a greater effort for the development of alternative products out of the farming now done in America.

We had farmers from the Middle West bring some very impressive things that they had made from their sort of side businesses in agriculture, including windshield wiper fluid. And they even gave me some golf tees, which I used. They're biodegradable, and that's important because I break one every time I swing a club. [Laughter]

I think it's very important that, as we look ahead, that we deal with not only the question of how much we're going to spend on agricultural supports, but what these programs are going to look like. Are we going to have, for example, a greater effort to help young farmers get into farming, when the average age of farmers keeps going up and up and up? Are we - if we want to get the prices up and have a long-term responsible program for the environment, shouldn't we preserve the conservation reserve program, or something awful much like it, no matter what we do to the rest of the farm supports?

And then there's this larger question of what the overall role of agriculture is to America. Yes, we do spend a substantial amount of money on farm supports. But as all of you know, we spend dramatically less than we did 10 years ago. The supports were cut a lot in '85; they were cut a lot in '90 and '93. And then again in this '96 budget, we proposed some modest cuts, mostly to tighten up the income eligibility.

But my belief is that since agriculture is producing this year over $50 billion worth of farm exports, the largest dollar value of exports in our history, we're going to have more than a $20 billion trade surplus in agriculture. And to give you some idea of the figures, roughly, we'll have a trade deficit maybe of something over $100 billion. And 60 percent of it is in automobiles from Japan and auto parts, and the rest of it's in oil. And otherwise we're pretty much in balance, thanks almost entirely to the massive surplus we enjoy in agriculture and in the sale of airplanes and airplane parts. And otherwise, we're more or less in balance.